[Wactclc-primo] Newspaper Discovery Portal

[Daniel Moore]

Hey all,

There's a thread going in Primo-L right now regarding the Newspaper
Discovery Portal that ExL introduced earlier this year. Ex Libris has
adjusted its rollout strategy for this portal due to intense customer
feedback.

I'm taking this subject to the Primo Working Group which is meeting
tomorrow but I also wanted to start a thread on it here since the Newspaper
Discovery Portal will no doubt have huge impacts across our libraries. How
are folks feeling about the current - if poorly communicated - plans to
move newspaper results out of general search results and into its own
discovery portal? Has anyone conducted any user testing with
students/faculty to see how this change might impact instruction and
research?

Ann Kucera at CMU reported the following data after testing the new portal
with students:

"We’ve tested it with students. ‘Please find 3 newspaper articles about
climate change.’ They began on our home page and needed to find a way to
get to the Newspaper search page.

-          About 1/3 (3 out of 9) of the students thought that the
‘Newspapers’ link in the facets was a heading and that all of the facets
below related to newspapers. The other 6 students clicked on it after a
short search and completed the task.

-          All 9 students said they had never needed to find newspaper
articles for any class.

-          No one clicked on the Newspapers link on the bottom of the page.

-          We haven’t had any complaints that people have told me about.

-          Reference and instruction librarians seem to think it’s fine."

With so little time left in this quarter I fear that conducting a
well-scoped user test is not feasible. We'll be doing some targeted user
testing next quarter on our website and Primo in general but will probably
wrap the Newspaper Discovery Portal into those tests.

-Dan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ctc.edu/pipermail/wactclc-primo_lists.ctc.edu/attachments/20181129/e186f801/attachment.html>