From CurrentCites, Jakob Neilsen did a study of 43 students to review how they interact with websites, including university sites.

The results busted three myths of student Internet use:

(1) Students are technology wizards

(2) Students crave multi-media and fancy design

(3) Students are enraptured by social networking

The students often preferred simple design, and repeated comments that have been heard again and again in website usability studies (e.g. website text should be easy to scan). Other findings included that students were skeptical of sites that lacked depth, and they often have multiple tabs open at once and switch contexts frequently.

The summary is here, and the full 259-page report is for sale, here.

Yesterday I attended an EDUCAUSE webinar called “Library in your Pocket: Strategies and Techniques for Developing Successful Mobile Services.”  Presented by the NCSU Libraries, it focused on services to patrons on mobile devices.

They have a few programmers who contributed time, and there was some discussion of the process they used to make a decision on which services they wanted to make available right away, and which of those can wait, or not b included at all.

The archive is available here.

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

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.)

Library Journal announced that EBSCOHost is releasing a discovery layer interface as a part of their Integrated Search platform.  Available at the end of 2009, it will be based on pre-indexed metadata, and will have include WorldCat records from OCLC.

To clarify, this is different from federated search.  A federated search sends searches out from a search screen, often resulting in long wait for results from various databases.  Pre-indexed searches will be faster because the article information has been compiled ahead of time.

My first thought was, does this mean that WorldCat Local will then include EBSCO content?  Apparently, the answer to that is Yes, as OCLC is now offering access to EBSCO databases via WCL for libraries who subscribe to both.