A Tale of Two Discoveries: Comparing the Usability of Summon and EBSCO Discovery Service

Foster, Anita K.; MacDonald, Jean B.

doi:10.1080/19322909.2013.757936

Cited by 18 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

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“…Of equal concern (and less easily accounted for), was the difficulty in discerning local holdings (21 percent) and item locations (25 percent), experienced by a significant number of participants when testing Summon. These findings were similar to those of Foster and MacDonald (2013) who also describe users having a difficult time determining the availability of search results when using Summon.…”

Section: Comparing the Tools -Usabilitysupporting

confidence: 79%

“…Unfortunately, challenges arose when users looked at search results, perhaps not a surprising finding as discovery tools contain many more types of formats than traditional catalogs. As in studies of Summon (Asher et al 2012;Foster and MacDonald 2013;Gross and Sheridan 2011), users had difficulties locating items, determining who owned an item, and dealing with multiple or similar results.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As others have noted, testing often occurs in an artificial scenario that does not necessarily represent how end-users typically interact with these tools (Foster and MacDonald 2013).…”

Section: Lessons Learned -Usersmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discovering Usability: Comparing Two Discovery Systems at One Academic Library

Djenno

Insua

Gregory

et al. 2014

Journal of Web Librarianship

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In the spring of 2013, the University Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago was in the unique position of having access to two discovery systems, Summon and WorldCat Local, at the same time. When tasked with choosing between the two systems, librarians undertook a usability study of Summon and WorldCat Local. The goal of this study was two-fold: to test the ease-of-use of each discovery system with an eye toward identifying one tool to retain for the longer term, and to learn about the search behaviors of different types of user groups.Eighteen subjects, consisting of undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty, participated in the study. Participants performed usability tasks using each tool and answered pre-task and post-task questions. While there was no clear preference among study participants for either discovery layer, individual groups did express preferences. Faculty, for example, preferred Summon to WorldCat Local at a rate of five to one. The study findings are explored in detail through an examination of the three major data sets produced by the usability test instrument: results derived from tasks performed by participants as part of the study; themes and trends identified by the investigators within the recorded participant tests; and discovery tool preferences as determined from pre-task and post-task questionnaires administered to study participants. This study has implications for librarians engaged in information literacy instruction; those considering implementing discovery tools, as well as for librarians currently using Summon or WorldCat Local at their libraries.

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Section: Comparing the Tools -Usabilitysupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discovering Usability: Comparing Two Discovery Systems at One Academic Library

Djenno

Insua

Gregory

et al. 2014

Journal of Web Librarianship

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“…Even this group, however, commented negatively on the number of search results returned and their difficulty locating specific resource types, a finding echoed in (Slaven et al 2011). The 'too many' results problem is supported by studies showing frequent search limiting behaviour (Foster et al 2013) (Ballard et al 2011); as seen in the previous subsection this means that the underlying relevance ranking in these systems is not supporting user goals or is mismatched with users' knowledge and skills.…”

Section: Web-scale Searchmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Early usability studies of web scale platforms touted them as broadly usable (Gross et al 2011;Slaven et al 2011;Foster et al 2013). On closer examination of the literature, however, these results are not so straightforward.…”

Section: Web-scale Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Boxing clever

McKay

Buchanan

2013

Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration

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One of the major problems users experience searching for information in libraries is the number of places they have to search. It has long been posited that a single search box (like Google) that searched a range of library resources would solve these problems and make users more effective information seekers in libraries. In this paper we use log analysis to compare user search behaviour in a single search box system with that in a traditional library catalogue. We discover that behaviour varies in response to the results produced by the different systems.

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