| Title |
Dates |
Report Date |
Brief Description |
|
|
April to June 2006 |
September 2006 |
A Yale Information Technology Services and Yale University Library survey of all Yale faculty (sponsored by the Provosts Office.) Asked to rank 19 statements for importance to them and priority for Yale. Top response: faculty in all disciplines ranked "easier access to digital content" the number 1 priority. |
|
|
Fall 2007 |
December 2007 |
74 students replied to the survey. Of those, 72 had used the E-reserves system. Scores ranged from the lowest 3.26 for quality of images on screen to 3.55 for quality of text on screen. These numbers are down from last year’s survey. The most commonly cited problem was "confusing course reserves list in Orbis.” When given a range of choices for class readings, 68.1% prefer e-reserves, while 29.0% prefer course packs. |
|
|
2006-2007 |
August 27, 2007 |
106 student participants responded, of whom 89 had actually used the e-reserves service. Highest satisfaction was with Print quality and Text quality on screen (both scored 4.3 out of 5) and lowest satisfaction was with Image quality (3.8 out of 5). When given a range of choices for class readings, most students prefered e-reserves 62% (the next choice was course packs at 30%). Most studies who answered the survey (99%) said e-reserves should continue as a library service. |
|
|
2006-2007 |
June 2007 |
Report on Refworks usage. |
|
|
2005-2006 |
June 2006 |
Report on Refworks usage. |
|
|
April 2007 |
June 2007 |
A sample of 521 search strings were examined. 35 (7%) were judged to be errors. These recommendations for improvements were made:
1. Ask Ex Libris to provide a spell checking/recommendation "did you mean?"
2. Consider searching the publisher field as part of the default search (would help people who search
for jstor).
3. When there are zero hits, suggest people search Metalib or Orbis. |
|
|
October 2006 |
October 2006 |
Usability study uncovered two major problems with the journals list: response time was unacceptably slow, and users wanted direct links to the journal (did not want to go through the SFX menu). |
|
|
August 2007 |
September 2007 |
Summary of findings from two staff focus groups discussing archival finding aids provided in the VTLS interface. |
|
February 2008 |
February 2008 |
Assessment of use of Finding Aids Database by giving tasks to a novice user. |
|
|
October 2007 |
December 2007 |
This study reports an examination of usage of subject guides, the ejournals A to Z list, and federated searching in Databases and Article Searching. Categories are not heavily used in Metalib or SFX.
Known titles are far more often searched, as are "by letter"
browses. This may simply reflect that category browse is not the default. If the Library wants to promote the use of subjects, the option will need to be made more prominent. Possibilities would be to list the top commonly searched category/subcategories, or to automatically display a link to find other journals or databases in the same category/categories as the title search. After examining thecategories used for Metalib and SFX however, it is clear that presenting users with two very different types of list represents an unnecessary complication. These should be changed to be as similar as possible. |
|
|
November-December 2006 |
March 2007 |
Interviews with faculty in the History of Art at Yale University. Report includes 12 recommendations needed to improve the Visual Resources Digital Library, including better search, integration with tools faculty already use such as Portfolio, and improved metadata for records in the VRDL. |
|
March 2008 |
March 2008 |
Test of the VITAL interface for reformatted books |
|
July 2005-June 2007 |
March 2008 |
A report on the overall use of the library’s server-- www.library.yale.edu--in fiscal years 2006 and 2007 |
|
January 2006-December 2007 |
March 2008 |
Metalib counts every time a patron selects a database from the Find a Database page. Although only a partial sample of all use, this data is still interesting because it is a simple way to compare use across all databases from different vendors. |
|
May 2008 |
May 2008 |
Summary of a series of tests evaluating undergraduate students' use of three electronic book interfaces. |
|
May 2008 |
May 2008 |
Test of the VuFind interface for a sample electronic books at the Medical Library. |
|
May 2008 |
May 2008 |
Test of the VuFind interface for a sample of items in the Library's catalog. |
