2 -- ILS failure

1. Where Does Your ILS Fail?
Are You Experienced?
Exploring User Experience
in Public Libraries

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 searching
Google and Amazon have spoiled us for the past decade…

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. "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?

8. Dr. Phil
That’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 phil
You expect to succeed, and you will:

9. 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!

10. 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:

11. 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”?

12. 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…

13. 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?

14. 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).

15. 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.

16. MARC-based searching
The 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?

17. 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?

18. 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?

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. So what are we doing to our
OPACs to make them better?
That is the question you need to ask yourself.
So read on…