(ALA) - Optimal design considerations for Web OPAC interfaces
American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference
Optimal design considerations for Web OPAC interfaces
Johan Ragetli and Holly Yu
The following is a report from the program entitled "Optimal Design Considerations for Web OPAC Interfaces," sponsored by the Internet Resources Interest Group. Five separate presenters from various backgrounds brought their expertise and experience to the session. The session was packed with research results, practical advice, OPAC interface customization techniques, and pros and cons of various OPAC interface designs that engendered a lot of laughs. The demonstration of alternative OPAC interfaces, representing academic, school and public libraries, generated great interest and many questions among the audience.
Elaine Toms, associate professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, opened the session with the topic "The one-stop-information search: what we can learn from Web search engines". Toms began by demonstrating that search mechanisms have remained relatively unchanged since the 1970s and that the search box is a direct descendant of the Unix prompt. Despite the success of commercial search engines, OPAC designers so far have not implemented tools such as popularity ranking, nor exploited circulation data to provide readers with lists of titles enjoyed by other patrons. Not all comparisons with commercial applications are valid, however. In her research Dr Toms compared searches based on specific tasks and noted that most searchers spent more time searching for medical, shopping, and travel-related information on the Web using search engines than on research using an OPAC.
According to Dr Toms, there are five basic actions in which users engage when seeking information: orient, monitor, scan, search, and ask. The lack of immediate and clear assistance available during these steps can lead to problems for the user and frequently to unsuccessful outcomes. Understanding the nature of these actions could help designers build improved search engines and OPACs. She also noted that one-stop searching may not be the best approach to addressing the variety and complexity of information needs. She finished by exhorting vendors and interface designers to think outside the box.
The next presenter, Johan Ragetli, representing KLLiC – a library consortium that includes two school boards and a public library – shared the practical results of his recent experience with designing an OPAC interface to meet the disparate needs of the consortium partners.
Using a variety of methods and tools including usability testing to identify outstanding functionality issues, Mr Ragetli explored the ups and downs of designing a usable interface. Several critical tasks were established early on that would serve as a guide to the development of the OPAC. It was important to have one interface for the consortium catalog with the additional interfaces for the individual catalogs. The catalog needed to be suitable for public users as well as for students, and had to have some consistency for students across the system. A consortium cataloging committee was also established to encourage standards.
Each of the three library systems has one system administrator, and currently each has customized the interface based on their own needs. The public libraries, for example, felt that browsing was most important, so those indexes were placed on the default search screen. The school libraries, on the other hand, had keyword searches on the default search screen. Despite these differences in appearance, Mr Ragetli nonetheless stressed the importance of agreeing on global settings, functions and design issues and requiring the partners to abide by them. Usability testing was also strongly recommended for those in the process of redesigning their OPACs, and was identified as an excellent guide for implementation. Another bit of advice was to include context-sensitive help and design custom interfaces for diverse users, but also to keep them similar to allow for easy use between the various catalogs. He also recommended hiring a Web developer/programmer, if one does not exist for your organization, due to the complexity of the software, tools and mark-up languages required for customizing Web OPACs.
He concluded by stating the libraries should not treat the catalog as a portal but instead integrate it with Web sites and other tools. Audience members were interested to find out how KLLiC has dealt with the issue of scoping to location, and asked questions about the tools used to customize the interface.
Scott Breivold and Stephen Sottong of the California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) Library Web Team discussed how the Library's Web-based OPAC evolved. Using the Innovative Interface (Innopac) as their source, they customized the interface to address issues identified in usability studies and OPAC transaction log analysis.
Scott Breivold, the Media, Communications and Arts Librarian at CSULA,examined the design aspect of the current CSULA OPAC. He described the process of translating the "out of the box" version of the Innovative Interface into a user-centred interface that was intuitive and ADA-compliant. Through showing various examples of OPAC interfaces from different types of libraries,Scott discussed how to customize native interfaces to suit user needs for both search screens and result display pages. He emphasized the tab approach as the OPAC navigational structure utilized at CSULA to integrate four different search modes into one common interface. Mr Breivold addressed many features on the CSULA OPAC. Highlights among these features were context-sensitive search examples and dual search capabilities on one search screen. The examples helped users know how to enter search terms, as shown in Figure 1. When the user selects a search method, a context-sensitive example appears on the screen that tells the user how she/he should input an author search, a title search, a keyword search, and the like.
The dual search function was to combine two catalogs together on one search screen. As you can see from the screen capture in Figure 1, the user enters search term(s) once, then she/he can select either the local CSULA catalog, or the All CSU union catalog – which searches the holdings of the 23 CSU campuses.
Figure 1 Search method context-senstive examples. One interface searching two calalogs (www.calstatela.edu/library/opac/atalog.html)
Stephen Sottong, the Engineering, Technology, and Computer Science Librarian at CSULA, demonstrated the technical aspect of OPAC interface customization. He began by showing how the underlying communication between the native OPAC interface and the catalog server was translated and grafted on to the new interface. The primary objective for the CSULA library catalog was to make a common user interface that masked the fact that the user might be searching separate catalogs (the catalog for CSULA books and other library materials, a separate CSU Union catalog, and a periodicals finding list). He explained that the most common mechanism for communication between an OPAC and a catalog server was via a URL. In the form of communication, the base address was the first part of the URL, the search information was appended after a question mark, and individual pieces of information were separated with ampersands. He also talked about the second most common method of OPAC communications, from Post, and how it could be adapted to a different interface.
After a brief discussion on the mechanism of translation process, he discussed in detail the technologies used to add value and ease-of-use for users. He stated that the common interface to the periodicals finding list and the dual catalog search of the basic search page could not have been achieved without JavaScript. Through a demonstration using screen shots, Mr Sottong illustrated how many of the features shown earlier by Scott Breivold on CSULA OPAC interface were created including the intelligent call number interface, the context-sensitive examples and the help screens, and the dual catalog search.
Mr Sottong concluded his presentation by saying that the possibilities of customizing a catalog interface were only limited by imagination and time.
Dr Jamshid Beheshti, the Director of the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at McGill University, was the fifth and final speaker to address the topic of OPAC design. Dr Beheshti began his presentation with a brief overview of the history of the OPAC and latest trends. He included a tour of OPACs from various libraries around the world, highlighting the similarities,poking a little fun at some wording, and generally lamenting the overall lack of design innovation.
On a more serious note, Dr Beheshti's research into children and search interfaces led to some interesting conclusions. In one research project, two groups of children in 3rd and 6th grades were given the opportunity to design their own search interfaces. Both groups tended to incorporate familiar elements from commercial software and games with different results. The younger group,made up of grade 3 students, leaned heavily on a virtual desktop approach with icons and graphical representations of menu items – such as books on a shelf, whereas the older group, grade 6 students, came up with a feature-rich environment with kid-friendly links that incorporated several different search strategies and search aids such as a language translator and a natural language search box. He observed that both groups employed many visuals.
In the last section of his presentation, Dr Beheshti provided some examples of leading edge design. Some notable applications were those featuring graphical representations of catalogs, contextual guides, and the inclusion of digital objects in the catalog.
In his conclusion, Dr Beheshti, echoing Dr Toms' earlier comments, encouraged OPAC designers to be more innovative, flexible in approach, to integrate search,view and print functions, and to incorporate personal or customizable elements to suit the user group being targeted.
About 200 people attended the Sunday morning session. The session concluded with a lively and extended question and answer period with a live Internet chat with Scott Breivold and Stephen Sottong from California. Owing to a sudden change in university policy on traveling to Toronto, the two speakers from CSULA presented their session through a pre-recorded PowerPoint narration. The section by Johan Ragetli on a joint OPAC design project covering school and public library OPAC interfaces generated great enthusiasm among audience members. The questions ranged from how to encourage vendors to implement new design theories,to the use of help pages, and ADA compliance for OPAC interfaces.
At the request of attendees, a Web page was created to cover presentations from all speakers at: www.calstatela. edu/library/ALA/ala-claOPAC.htm
Johan Ragetli(Johan_Ragetli@kpr.edu.on.ca), Library Information Analyst Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.Holly Yu (hyu3@calstatela.edu), Library Web Administrator/Reference Librarian, University Library, California State University, Los Angeles, California, USA.
