1. Evaluation of an Online Catalog Assignment

2. The Scenario Your institution, the Lily and James Potter Memorial Library, has decided to upgrade to a new Web-based OPAC (online public access catalog). You have been appointed to form a committee that will recommend a vendor to provide the software for your new catalog. Your committee should have three or four members. As part of the research process each committee member will access a Web-based catalog, evaluate it, and report back to the committee...

3. Steps  Form a group of 3 or more persons  Decide on catalogs to be evaluated  Decide on evaluation criteria  Each person explores and evaluates an OPAC  Compare evaluations and decide on which OPAC to recommend  Submit individual evaluations, your comparisons, and your decision

4. Selecting OPAC Software for Evaluation

5.  Compare oranges to oranges

6. University Library OPAC

7. Children’s OPAC

8. Selecting OPAC Software for Evaluation  Utah State University (Encore from Innovative Interfaces)  Dartmouth College (WebPAC Pro from Innovative Interfaces)  Nottingham Trent University (Primo from ExLibris)

9. Finding the Corporate Identifier Nottingham Trent University harry potter

10. Finding the Corporate Identifier Nottingham Trent University

11. Finding the Corporate Identifier Nottingham Trent University

12. Selecting Only One Catalog Auburn University

13. Selecting Only One Catalog Auburn University harry potter

14. Selecting Only One Catalog Auburn University

15. Selecting Only One Catalog Auburn University harry potter

16. Selecting Only One Catalog Auburn University

17. Finding OPACs for Evaluation http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donnab/lis670/online_catalogs.html

18. Exploring and Evaluating an OPAC

19. View as a Novice Do we know what to do? What will the system do?

20. View as a Novice

21. Try It Out coming of age in Samoa

22. Do we know what to do at this point?

23. Help To save or print information about specific records... WebVoyáge Help Titles To display the record details associated with a title, click on the underlined title... Context-Specific Help

24. Try It Out

25. Detailed Record Is this clear?

26. Help You also have the options... WebVoyáge Help Holdings Information Context-Specific Help

27. Detailed Record

28. Search Screen

29. View as a Novice

30. Search Screen

31. Generate an Error Message Leave text box blank

32. Generate a Error Message Type in gibberish asdfsdf

33. System Response Is the language benign? Is this message helpful?

34. Steps Today  Form a group with at least 3 persons  Decide on catalogs to be evaluated  Decide on evaluation criteria

35. Evaluation Criteria Criteria Error messages are benign and helpful 1 2 3 4 5 Disagree Agree Positive statement Rating scale

36. Comparing Catalogs Criteria Error messages are benign and helpful 3 USC There is plenty of lavender 4 Total 5 Harvard Yale 43 22 67