Category Archives: preview

SUNCAT Redevelopment Feedback Survey Report

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We made a preview version of the new service available at UKSG in early April and just closed this off a few weeks ago. During this period we put up an online survey and encouraged emails to the EDINA helpdesk to ask our users for their views on the functionality and ease of use of the redeveloped service. A full report is now available on our website.

Overall, the response was very positive and any significant issues which were raised, EDINA were already aware of and are currently busy trying to resolve for the next release, due this autumn. Over 70% of the respondents reported that the preview service was better than the current service and we hope to improve this figure further as we iron out the glitches.

“Very bold design, clear and simple. A great improvement. Will encourage use of the service.”

 

We are happy that the vast majority of respondents found that the basic search facility was easy to use, 89%, and that the newly introduced post-search filters were found to be useful to 83% of respondents. Respondents reported that both the pre and post search filters would be good tools for reducing large result sets and filtering out holdings which might not be of interest, e.g. electronic or print holdings.

“Having the basic phrases in the first drop down box allows an easy search but also one that can still be refined without having to go to advanced search. Limiting locations and institutions is useful, especially for us as a public library as we know a number of locations will not lend so we can limit to those that do.”

Some respondents reported issues related to the display of the results list and the advanced search and work is on-going to resolve these. We were already aware that the Exact Title search was a little too exact – requiring exact matching on punctuation and letter case! Further, the relevancy ranking was not always working as expected, so these are another two areas we are currently concentrating on getting optimised.

The feedback received has been extremely useful in confirming areas we had concerns about and so helping us to prioritise immediate fixes for the next release, while also highlighting other interesting suggestions we can investigate for future releases.

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SUNCAT redevelopment survey reminder

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The survey on the preview of the redeveloped SUNCAT service and the preview itself is available until Monday 13th May. Please do take a few minutes to have a look at the service and let us have your feedback. All comments are very welcome and will provide us with vital information on any areas which require further development. Thank you to all who have responded so far.

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk.

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SUNCAT redevelopment survey reminder

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The survey on the preview of the redeveloped SUNCAT service and the preview itself is available until Monday 13th May. Please do take a few minutes to have a look at the service and let us have your feedback. All comments are very welcome and will provide us with vital information on any areas which require further development. Thank you to all who have responded so far.

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

SUNCAT Redevelopment: Focus on Post Search Filters

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This is the second in a series of blog posts highlighting some of the new features which will be available in the redeveloped SUNCAT. In this post we are going to focus on how the post search filters will improve the new service, enabling the use of faceted browsing to lead users to the most relevant journal titles and holdings for their needs.

Post search filters will be available from the search results display, down the left hand side of the results list, and will provide similar functionality as you will be familiar with via other discovery services and many commercial shopping and travel websites.

At this point we plan to include the following facets:

  • Institution (the institutions holding the journals returned in the current results list)
  • Format (includes electronic and print formats)
  • Subject
  • Author (organisation associated with journals where relevant)
  • Publisher
  • Year (first published)
  • Place of publication
  • Language
Each filter will also display the number of records in the results set associated with it. The five most common filters from each result set will display for most of the facets, with the option to view decreasingly common filters also available. However, in the case of the institutions facet, filters will be displayed alphabetically to allow you to skim down the list for particular institutions, and in the year facet, filters will be displayed in reverse chronological order.

You will be able to combine filters to drill right down to journal titles matching quite specific criteria, but you will then also be able to simply remove filters to widen your results back up again.

An interesting side effect of displaying the filters is that it is now possible to easily see the variation present in the records supplied to SUNCAT, which goes a long way to explaining why not all the records which we would like to match together do! Part of the next step of the development work will be to try and amalgamate some of the filters so that they display in a more manageable and helpful fashion. For example combining year filters containing no numerical characters, such as “||||”, “uuuu” etc. into one “Unknown” filter. Also publication place filters such as “london”, “London.”, “London,” etc. into one filter for “London”.

You can see the faceted browsing in action on the preview service which will be available until Monday 13th May, so please take a look and let us have your comments via the online survey or by email to edina@ed.ac.uk

The following screenshot shows the filters on the preview service:

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

Feedback on the New Look SUNCAT

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As we posted a few weeks ago a preview of the new look SUNCAT service is available at http://test.suncat.ac.uk and a huge thank you to all who have sent us comments so far.

We’ve now put up a short survey and would be very grateful for your input which will help to guide the ongoing development of the service. If you prefer you can also let us have your comments via the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk

We would also encourage you to circulate details of the preview service and the survey as widely as possible.

Both the survey and the preview will only be available until Monday 13th May, but development work will still be continuing and so we will have more posts to keep you up to date with progress.

Please take a few minutes to let us know what you think!

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

SUNCAT at UKSG 2013

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The SUNCAT team were very happy to attend this year’s excellent UKSG Annual Conference in Bournemouth. We hope that those of you who attended were able to visit the SUNCAT stand and try out our new interface!

Team members Paula Cuccurullo and Celia Jenkins have summarised some of the plenaries and breakouts they attended for the official UKSG conference blog.

You can still take a look at the new-look SUNCAT. Let us have your feedback via edina@ed.ac.uk. The new service is still in development so please continue to use the current SUNCAT as your primary service.

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

Preview the New Look SUNCAT

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Good morning from UKSG 2013! As promised last month the new look SUNCAT is now available for you to preview at http://test.suncat.ac.uk

The current service will continue as the primary service for the moment, but we would encourage you to take a look, experiment and let us have your feedback on the new service as soon as you get a chance.

The new service is still in development, so there are still issues to be resolved with keeping it up-to-date, searching and relevancy ranking, but to give you a flavour, the new service:

• Integrates information from the website and the actual service more closely, with the search box, a map of our Contributing Libraries and a feed of our latest news all on the homepage

• Enables searching limited to a specific library or selection of libraries: you will only see the serials’ holdings of libraries you have specified in your search

• Enables searching limited to a specific location or selection of locations, all the way from Inverness to Exeter: again you will only see the serials’ holdings in locations you have specified in your search.

• Plus you can combine library and location limits to suit your individual search requirements

• Enables searching limited to electronic or print serials only: helpful if you only want to see what might be immediately available online or conversely if want to see only material likely to be available via Inter-Library Loan.

• Enables filtering of search results by library, location, subject, organisation, publisher, date etc.

• Enables more sophisticated searching via the Advanced Search option

• Allows you to choose how many records you want to display on your search results screen

• Provides an alphabetical list of all the libraries holding a particular serial title

• Allows you to quickly see if holdings are print or electronic

• Opens up further information about each library, including directions, contact details, British Library code and when it was last updated in SUNCAT

If you are attending UKSG, please come along to the EDINA stand 26 and we will be happy to demo the service for you and answer your questions in person. However, you can also let us know what you think or if you have any questions or suggestions via the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk

We hope you like what you see!

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

Preview the New Look SUNCAT in Early April

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We’ve been blogging about the new look SUNCAT for a few months now, giving you a look at the new homepage, some background on the technical architecture and also some idea of the new features which will be available. However, we now hope to let you have a preview of the new service itself!

The current service will continue as the primary service until further notice, but you can check out the redeveloped service from 8th April when we preview it at the UKSG Conference (Bournemouth 8-10 April). We will let you know the url on the day and from then on we would encourage you to take a look, experiment and let us have your feedback, good and bad! The service is still in development so the more feedback we can gather at this point the better.

If you are attending UKSG, please come along to the EDINA stand 26 and we will be happy to demo the service for you and answer your questions in person. However, we would also encourage you to let us know what you think or if you have any questions or suggestions via the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com

SUNCAT Redevelopment

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We reported in a blog post in November that a new interface for SUNCAT is being developed and since good progress has been made we are keen to share with you more details on what we are doing and perhaps more importantly when we plan to show what has been done. We are working towards having a public preview of the new interface early in April.

Building up to this we will have a blog post next week on the technical architecture which has been adopted. This will be followed by blog posts on the functionality, which will be available initially, and outlining the details for the public preview. We are very keen to find out from our users what they think of the development and accordingly will be asking for feedback after users have had a chance to view the interface.

Future blog posts will include sharing the roadmap of our planned developments until the end of the year and providing information on specific aspects of the technical developments.

It’s clearly a busy time for us but we feel that it is time and effort well spent as we will be in a position to develop and implement requested functionality much more quickly than we have been able to in the past.

SUNCAT is the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK. Visit the service at http://www.suncat.ac.uk or the SUNCAT blog at http://suncatblog.blogspot.com