Where Does Your ILS Fail?

Are You Experienced? Exploring User Experience

in Public Libraries

Success and Failure of the ILS

• Where does the ILS succeed?The librarian interface works. It is a great inventory-control system in the hands of trained staff.

• Where does the ILS fail?The patron interface (OPAC) disappoints. Patrons and library staff alike can’t find things.

Where did the ILS begin to fail?

The original intent of ILS was to make all the manual library tasks automatic – at a time when libraries mainly had large print collections. It wasn’t about serving the patrons; it was about making the library manageable for staff.

The satisfaction of library patrons was not an original objective.

What do patrons want?

"Only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find."

– Roy Tennant (former California Digital Libraries manager and LJ columnist, now working for OCLC’s RLG Programs division)

one-stop shopping one-stop searchingGoogle and Amazon have spoiled us for the past decade…

What is at stake?

"If the environment comes off as too complex and isn't user-friendly, the library may not see its resources used to their full potential."

-- Breeding, Marshall. (October 2006). Knitting systems together. Computers in Libraries, 26, 32-35.

Consider Mooer's law

"An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him to not have it."

-- Calvin Mooer. Mooer's Law was first articulated in American Documentation, 11(3) (July 1960), p.ii.

"True Confessions" time

Many years ago, a patron came up to me and wanted to find books on the gentleman I have pictured here. He was more popular a few years ago, but Americans nowadays probably still know him by sight (and non-Americans can learn a bit of American popular culture here).

How would you search for this guy?

Dr. PhilThat’s what we call him! Go to Amazon (www.amazon.com/) or Google (www.google.com) and perform the search that you would expect anyone would perform: dr philYou expect to succeed, and you will:

And in a typical OPAC?Go to my library’s OPAC (catalog.cdpl.lib.in.us/polaris/) and perform the same search.You will also succeed! But I did not succeed when I first tried to help that patron. I found nothing!

But why didn’t you succeed? Can’t you type “dr phil”?

To explain why I did not succeed, I am going to show you a screenshot of another library’s results for a “dr phil” search (performed 3/31/2015). I show you the screenshot because I do not want to identify the library. It has the same ILS as my library, by the way (Polaris from iii), and the OPAC is similar.

Here is what I get when I search on that library’s OPAC:

There are no Dr. Phil items in those four returns!

What public library does not have Dr. Phil stuff? And the OPAC asks if I meant to type “dry pail” Why would I want to find “dry pail”?

Doesn’t this library have Dr. Phil stuff?This library does have Dr. Phil stuff, and I can find several books. Here is one of them below.So what happened? How did I finally locate this book? -- Think of what a traditional OPAC has to search on…

Examine the MARC record of a Dr. Phil item

LDR |||||cam a22||||| a 4500

001 68226

005 20071212123515.0

008 020214s2001 nyu 000 0 eng u

010 $a 2001054935

020 $a074322423X :$c$25.00

035 $aGB001054935

050 00 $aBF637.S4$b.M24 2001

082 00 $a158.1$221

092 $a158.1 MACG

100 1 $aMcGraw, Phillip C.,$d1950-

245 10 $aSelf matters :$bcreating your life from the inside out /$cPhillip C. McGraw.

260 $aNew York :$bSimon & Schuster Source,$c2001.

263 $a0111

300 $axi, 314 p. ;$c25 cm.

650 0 $aSelf-actualization (Psychology)

950 $dFeb-14-2002

999 $b158.1 MCGR$c0$g1$h1$i1$j1$k0$x158.1 MACG$z0$!2

If you look at the MARC records* of the library that still fails to return Dr. Phil items on a “dr phil” search, you’ll see that the name “dr phil” either does not appear in the MARC record or it appears in a part of a field that is not indexed!

*Many OPACs allow MARC-record viewing. Does yours?

So why does CDPL now find "dr phil"?We edited the MARC records to make sure that Dr. Phil was found by those patrons – and staff – who did not know that his name was really Phillip McGraw (which is how you find him in the other library’s OPAC).

When I was trying to help that patron find Dr. Phil items in my library, I actually had to Google him to find his real name. For me – and for library patrons – he was just simply Dr. Phil. And always will be.

By the way, I also changed the did-you-mean? file of our OPAC so that it does not suggest “dry pail” for any Dr. Phil searches.

MARC-based searchingThe traditional ILS-based OPAC that has just the metadata from a MARC record does not give us a lot to search on…

Do you have the time and resources to modify the MARC records of items that patrons can’t seem to locate very easily?

Can you edit your did-you-mean? database for every iteration of a failed search?

So are OPACs generally bad?

No! If you know what you are looking for and you can spell it right (and know the authorized terms such as “Phillip McGraw”), you can find anything in an OPAC. You may have to think a little bit, of course…

But do Google and Amazon expect their users to think?

Why are Google and Amazon so smart?In either I can find right away stuff on Jean-Paul Sartre when I mistype (or misspell!) Sartre as Sarte. So is their metadata superior?

Their metadata may not be better…

…but they do have more metadata to work with, better search algorithms that will never be shared with you or me, excellent error correction, top-notch programmers, and a bunch more $$$ than any library in this universe.

But don't worry…even our best OPACs will find Sarte [sic] stuff for you…as long as that is the metadata they have to work with.

So what are we doing to our OPACs to make them better?

That is the question you need to ask yourself.So read on…