Towards the end of April Scott and I spent some time with two members of staff demonstrating the use of the repository. Scott provided training materials and we asked them to spend some time on their own experimenting with using the repository and then providing us with feedback on their experiences. One member of staff was an academic in American Studies and Politics who was interested in sharing resources for his students as well as his own research with colleagues. The second staff member works in the Learning Development Team (LDT) within the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and would be using the repository to encourage staff to share resources for their teaching. Both were competent IT users who were familiar with searching for materials for their research. Two weeks later they both sent me feedback on how they had found using the repository.
During the initial session they both raised questions that it would be important to answer during a staff development session. It reminded me how easy it is to become too familiar with a piece of software and believe it’s completely straightforward and intuitive… when in reality… Questions such as ‘what does JACS mean?’, ‘what do you mean by workflow?’ and more fundamentally ‘how do you envision the repository being used – staff to share, students to browse, or both?’ Other issues such as ‘how are the search results ranked?’ led into discussions around the importance of inputting the right keywords at the cataloguing phase to make it as easy as possible to retrieve the right documents. They also both agreed that there needed to be a clear explanation of the object in the search results, so you didn’t have to preview everything just because the title looked relevant. This emphasised to me to importance of staff development being delivered by a team containing the teaching and learning point of view (how will we use the repository to support the pedagogy) and the library expertise (how do we successfully catalogue these objects so they can be found again!).
After a couple of weeks playing around with the repository, their feedback contained many similar points. They both found Scott’s training materials to be really helpful, but they would have liked a really simple flowchart as well showing the workflow and the stages they had to move through. They felt that this kind of ‘memory jog’ would help once they were more familiar with the why and what of each stage of the process. Pictures of the buttons would also be useful as they felt some of the stages are a bit hidden (both users had access to Intralibrary 2.9). There was a feeling that there seemed to be too many stages and they weren’t clear what they were all for. One of them compared it to purchasing an item on Amazon, where you are clearly guided through the stages at the top of the screen and know how much you’ve done and how much is left to do. I think this is slightly improved in what we’ve seen of the new version of Intralibrary, as the user is guided through the stages of the workflow much more clearly. The worry was that after inputting all the data, classifying and clicking save, the user might forget they needed to do anything else and objects would get forgotten in the work area.
When searching, our academic volunteer found the Advanced Search screen quite frustrating and confusing. He wrote;“On the Advanced Search page it's possible to get quite confused over where to put your main search term. When one chooses a first constraint (so I chose to search the 'faculty first' collection), one is very tempted to look around for somewhere else to put your basic search term: I ended up trying the simple search box in the bar at the top of the screen before registering that I'd need to open a new constraint field and choose a new category of constraint…..must whatever's in the search box be deleted when one changes constraints? People will want to play with words through various search devices. For example, if I'm moving from a title search to a keyword search I don't want to have to type in "onomatopoeic" twice!” Again, this is something to keep in mind when producing training materials and delivering staff development sessions.
On the plus side, they were both really supportive of the concept and really liked the idea of being able to use the same document via the public URL on the VLE without having to upload it several times. The idea of being able to share pre-published research for peer review amongst colleagues or with students to use was also seen as a positive. The academic member of staff liked the flexibility of the metadata and the fact he could add extra fields if necessary. He finished by saying that for those involved with learning and teaching, particularly cross disciplinary, he viewed it as a really useful facility and hoped he would be able to continue using it.
Keywords: feedback, Repository, staff training
Posted by Georgina Spencer @ Keele Pathfinder Team
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