Springer launched a free analytics tool providing visualizations for usage of Springer’s online products, called Springer Realtime. It shows keywords for recently downloaded articles, mapping of downloads, charts and article-level information.

What if there was something like this for your library’s downloads?

[Thanks, Martha!]

The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has this pretty dashboard where they display the statistics that are relevant to their library.   This includes database statistics, cataloging statistics, membership information, and so on.

Has anyone seen anything like this in use in an academic setting?  It seems like a nice way to package some numbers about the kinds of things we do, and usage information.

[Thanks Kate!]

Marshall Breeding at Library Technology Guides has published Perceptions 2009: An International Survey of Library Automation. The survey asked about levels of satisfaction with various companies libraries use for their ILS, as well as information on open source products.

From librarytechnology.org:

From the current issue of Code4Lib, an article on getting quick user feedback using a new tool.

Infomaki is an open source “lightweight” usability testing tool developed by the New York Public Library to evaluate new designs for the NYPL.org web site and uncover insights about our patrons. Designed from the ground up to be as respectful of the respondents’ time as possible, it presents respondents with a single question at a time from a pool of active questions. In just over seven months of use, it has fielded over 100,000 responses from over 10,000 respondents.

A new article in the Journal of Library Administration talks about the path that library systems have followed, and what we can expect from the future. Written by Andrew Pace at OCLC.

Pace, A. (2009). 21st Century Library Systems. Journal of Library Administration, 49(6), 641-650.

DOI: 10.1080/01930820903238834

Friday I gave a presentation at the Western New York Library Resource Council‘s conference, Revved up for Reference: Virtual Reference in New York State. It was held in Ithaca, NY, and had about 50 attendees for the full event.

I spoke on Drexel’s implementation of Libraryh3lp, and my slides (pdf) are posted here, along with the other presenters’ slides, and photos of the event on the conference website.

My talk featured some statistical charts from LibraryH3lp –here’s the amount of IM traffic to the widget on the library home page, by month.

Jan-Sept 23, 2009

Here’s a chart of IMs we get, by time of day, and day of the week.

If you’d like to see more of these stats, please leave a comment, or just send me an email.

The University of Rochester has been working steadily on a project called the eXtensible Catalog, or XC.

XC is meant to provide a discovery layer to work along with existing library systems.  They’re working on creating “services” that will transform various formats of resources and data into a common format that can be delivered to users in a unified interface.

They are using Drupal as their content management system, which could be useful for us here, since we’re using Drupal as well.  They’re also working on Blackboard integration.

There is a set of 6 screencasts that describe the functionality of XC, how it works, and what can be expected from the project.  He discusses the challenges presented by library metadata, including the transition from existing MARC data and RDA.

OCLC has released some notes on usability tests they’d conducted on Worldcat Local.  Here’s a link to the an 8-page PDF of the comments.

One item of note is the broad dislike for ratings by graduate students (p. 7).

For those of you following the XC project at the University of Rochester, here’s the latest update.

[From a post to the LITA list from Jennifer Bowen at UR.]

The eXtensible Catalog project at the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries is pleased to release the first report on the user research that we conducted in support of XC software development. We thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and our user research partners – Cornell, Ohio State, Yale and the University of Rochester – for their generous support of this project.

Use this URL – http://hdl.handle.net/1802/6873 – for a report that summarizes the objectives, methods, and major software design findings from the data collected in the user research portion of the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project. A full analysis and interpretation of the data is not included in the present report and will be provided at the conclusion of the project. This report includes edited results from the brainstorming sessions and a list of the features that emerged from the analysis of those results. (See the eXtensible Catalog website at www.eXtensibleCatalog.org for more information about the overall project.)

Several months ago, I wrote about Summon, Serials Solutions “Unified Search Interface”.

Dartmouth College has a beta version that is open to the public.  Try it here.

Let me know what you think.

[Thanks Larry!]