Karen Calhoun: August 2009 Archives

With so many travel budgets (including OCLC's) slashed to the bone this year, the new or formerly well-traveled professional turns his or her thoughts toward alternative means for networking, sharing and keeping up with the latest. Webinars are an obvious choice, but IMO many tend to be dull for the presenter and audience alike. So some OCLC colleagues and I decided to try something new--an experiment with the more interactive features of the webinar software we use here in the Ohio offices, Webex. But first we had to choose a topic.

I've been an admirer of the usability studies that OCLC's Christie Heitkamp and her team have been undertaking, partly in collaboration with early adopters of WorldCat Local. For my part, some of you may be aware that over the past year I worked with members of Janet Hawk's market research group here at OCLC to investigate what data 'quality' means to a variety of constituencies of library online catalogs. This spring we published our study and over the past few months we have been disseminating the results.

Christie's team is concentrating on making the end user's experience better through the interface; my team's focus is to learn how to optimize the utility of the data underlying the interface (can't have one without the other--both data and interface are important). We thought an exploration of our two studies might be an interesting topic for our first try at a more interactive, dare-I-say more 'usable' webinar.

The resulting webinar, "Online Catalogs: Designing with Users in Mind", recorded Aug. 13, 2009, was designed to elicit more engagement with attendees (there were 228 of them representing a wide range of types of libraries and librarians/staff). Our purpose was to create a two-way learning environment. We tried out the polling and chat features, opened the chat and full screen views to all attendees, paused at several points for Q&A, and solicited direct feedback at the end of the session. The technology cooperated, shall we say, some of the time, so it was necessary to ask for attendees' forbearance on several occasions. Our post-event analysis of the chat suggests that many were willing to bear with us as we learn the ins and outs of these new methods to communicate with one another. Christie and I (and our teams) certainly gained numerous insights from what attendees had to say.  

For your reference, you can link to the recording of the event, in which Christie and I report on their online catalog research findings, discuss user and usability studies, and describe resulting changes made to WorldCat, WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. We've also made the chat dialog available for reading (the chat also contains our answers to questions, added after the event), as well as the polling results. 

We welcome your comments on the chat transcript, the recording, our reports (see links below), the webinar format ...as well as your suggestions for future webinar topics.

For more about our research:

An 8-page paper on Christie's team's research is available from  http://www.oclc.org/worldcatlocal/usability. 

My team's study of what users and librarians want from online catalogs is freely downloadable from http://www.oclc.org/us/en/reports/onlinecatalogs/default.htm.  For those not ready to sit down with a 50-plus page report, there is also a two-page executive summary.  Watch the page for our forthcoming 15-page synopsis as well.