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We’ve been running Primo as our new Library Search discovery system since the end of April so it’s been ‘live’ for just over four months. Although it’s been a quieter time of year over the summer I thought it would be interesting to start to see what the analytics are saying about how Library Search is being used.
Internal click-throughs
Some analytics are provided by the supplier in the form of click-through statistics and there are some interesting figures that come out of those. The majority of searches are ‘Basic searches’, some 85%. Only about 11% of searches use Advanced search. Advanced search isn’t offered against the Library Search box embedded into the home page of the library website but is offered next to the search box on the results page and on any subsequent search. It’s probably slightly less than I might have expected as it seemed to be fairly frequently mentioned as being used regularly on our previous search tool.
About 17% of searches lead to users refining their search using the facets. Refining the search using facets is something we are encouraging users to do, so that’s a figure we might want to see going up. Interestingly only 13% navigated to the next page in a set of search results using the forward arrow, suggesting that users overwhelmingly expect to see what they want on the first page of results. (I’ve a slight suspicion about this figure as the interface presents links to pages 2-5 as well as the arrow – which goes to pages 6 onwards – and I wonder if pages 2-5 are taken into account in the click-through figure).
Very few searches (0.5% of searches) led users to use the bX recommendations, despite this being in a prominent place on the page. The ‘Did you mean’ prompt also seemed to have been used in 1% of searches. The bookshelf feature ‘add to e-shelf’is used in about 2% of searches.
Web analytics
Looking at web analytics shows that Chrome is the most popular browser, followed by Internet Exploer, Safari, and Firefox.
75% of traffic comes from Windows computers with 15% from Macintoshes. There’s a similar amount of traffic from tablets to what we see on our main library website, with tablet traffic running at about 6.6% but mobile traffic is a bit lower at just under 4%.
Overall impressions
Devices using library search seem pretty much in line with traffic to other library websites. There’s less mobile phone use but possibly that is because Primo isn’t particularly well-optimised for mobile devices and also maybe something to test with users whether they are all that interested in searching library discovery systems through mobile phones.
I’m not so surprised that basic search is used much more than advanced search. It matches the expectations from the student research of a ‘google-like’ simple search box. The data seems to suggest that users expect to find results that are relevant on page one and not go much further, something again to test with users ‘Are they getting what they want’. Perhaps I’m not too surprised that the ‘recommender’ suggestions are not being used but it implies that having them at the top of the page might be taking up important space that could be used for something more useful to users. Some interesting pointers about things to follow up in research and testing with users.
I’ve been reading a great blog post by Peter Morville on Semantic Studios ‘Inspiration Architecture: the Future of Libraries‘ and it includes a great description that really resonated
There was even a big move towards the vision of “library as platform.” Noble geeks developed elaborate schemata for open source, open API, open access environments with linked data and semantic markup to unleash innovation and integration through transparency, crowdsourcing, and mashups. They waxed poetic about the potential of web analytics and cloud computing to uncover implicit relationships and emerging patterns, identify scholarly pathways and lines of inquiry, and connect and contextualize artifacts with adaptive algorithms. They promised ecosystems of participation and infrastructures for the creation and sharing of knowledge and culture.
Unfortunately, the folks controlling the purse strings had absolutely no idea what these geeks were talking about, and they certainly weren’t about to entrust the future of their libraries (and their own careers) to the same bunch of incompetent techies who had systematically failed, for more than ten years, to simply make the library’s search box work like Google.
I’ve highlighted the last bit as it really struck home. The great search for a library equivalent of the Google Search box is something that is familar to anyone working in trying to build better ways of helping users get to library content. It has pretty much been a mantra over the past few years. (for a great summary of how library search systems differ from Google look at Aaron Tay’s blogpost from last May and his blogpost on web scale discovery from December last year.) So it’s easy to find examples of where libraries and other organisations have tried to put in place a google-like search, from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, from the American University and from others such as the National Archives and Records Administration (reported in Information Management Journal, March 2011) and Oregon State University (paper by Stefanie Buck and Jane Nichols ‘Beyond the search box’ in Reference & User Services Quarterly March 2012.
The current generation of discovery systems (Summon, EDS, Primo etc) are largely built around the concept of a ‘google-like’ search. As reported here for McGill University by OCLC for WorldCat Local. In some ways it seems to me that we’ve been concentrating too much on the simplicity of the original Google interface and as Lorcan Dempsey pointed out in his ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at Libraries, Discovery and the Catalog’
‘a simple search box has only been one part of the Google formula. Pagerank has been very important in providing a good user experience, and Google has progressively added functionality as it included more resources in the search results. It also pulls targeted results to the top of the page (sports results, weather or movie times, for example), and it interjects specific categories of results in the general stream (news, images).’
So although we’ve implemented a ‘google-like’ search box it becomes apparent that it doesn’t entirely solve the problem. It’s a bit like a false summit or false peak. You think you’ve reached the top but realise that you still have some way to go. Relevancy ranking becomes vitally important and with the Discovery service generation you’ve essentially handed that over to a vendor to control the relevancy algorithm. You can add your local content into the system and have some control but it is limited. And you are constrained in what you can add into the discovery platform. Your catalogue, link resolver/knowledge base generally yes, your institutional repository yes, but your other lists of resources in simple databases, not so easily unless they happen to be OAI-PMH or MARC.
So you look at bringing together content from different systems, probably using the Bento Box approach (as used by Stanford and discussed by them here) where you search across your different systems using APIs etc and return a series of results from each of those systems. You then get a series of results that come from each of the different systems and incorporate the relevancy ranking of discovery systems, rather than ranking the relevancy of the results in total. So is that going to be any better for users? Is it going to be better to sort the results by system, as Stanford have done? or should we be trying to pull results together, as Google do? That’s something we need to test.
But there’s a nagging feeling that this still all relies on users having to come to ‘the library’ rather than being where the users are. So OK, we can put library search boxes into the Virtual Learning Environment, so we’ve an article search tool that searches our Discovery system, but if your users start their search activity with Google, then the challenge is about going beyond Google Scholar to get library discovery up to the network level.
Well, our new library website has gone for QA this week. It’s been a long journey but we’re not far off from completing the site. There are still a few checks and tweaks to complete, and further testing and no doubt further changes. But, we’re now at a stage where the site looks like a completed website, with all the design, content, structure, features and links in place.
The site is a mix with the static content contained within drupal and with dynamic content using ajax/php being used to display library resources, by subject and by content type. The dynamic content is drawn from a back-end database that takes data from the library management system and other systems. This will hopefully make it easier to keep the content of these resource pages up to date.
Some of the terminology we’re using in the site has changed from the current site, so we are using Library Resources instead of Collections, after running a quick SurveyMonkey questionnaire to get user feedback. Library Resources is consistent with the term used in our Virtual Learning Environment Moodle so it should make it clearer to users what to expect in this section.
As well as building in dynamic lists of news and training sessions into the home page of the site we have included quite a few changes in the help on the website. The main change is the introduction of a ‘context-specific’ help feature. We’ve been thinking about this ‘help channel’ feature for quite a long time. The feature uses a Drupal module called ‘Similar by Terms’ that lets us dynamically push into a box on a page a list of links to pages in the site that are using the same met
adata tags and are from the help and support section. This box, labelled ‘How Do I…’ means that on a library resources page about ejournals we can show links to FAQs and other help material about accessing journals.
In the help and support section itself we’ve also been able to interfile FAQs (which are taken from our CRM system) in with our other help content, to avoid users having to search through several lists of different types of help to find what they need.
With search after a lot of work to ask users what they want and investigate what works we’ve gone away from the multiple tab approach on the home page that we’ve used with mix results for the last few years. We had mounting evidence that users really didn’t understand the differences between the different tabs. So we are providing a single Find articles search box to One Stop Search (Ebsco Discovery Solution). We are also providing links to journals, ebooks and subject search pages that provide search boxes (to SFX for journal titles and to Voyager for ebooks) or a subject search feature and some explanatory text.
We’ve still got more testing to do but initial reactions from library staff to the design are good. We’ve got a few bits to finish off to make sure that the changeover from the old to the new site goes smoothly and to get the final signoffs from QA and elsewhere, but we are nearly there, thanks to all the hard work of everyone involved.
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