Organization Monkey

lately i’ve been thinking a lot about trust related to e-resources, and that whether an e-resource “just works” or “is broken” affects our patrons’ perceptions of the library. we know from e-commerce that if a buyer has a poor experience with an online user interface she is likely not to shop on that site again. that concept should easily translate to how a patron interacts with a library website — if it doesn’t work the way she expects, she’ll find her information somewhere else.

ask any librarian if this is acceptable and they’d say, “no,” but it happens all the time. look at the proquest rollout of their new platform. we saw it demonstrated in april of 2010, migrated to the new platform in december of that year, and then promptly migrated back to the old platform when our patrons reported major problems with it. it’s almost a year later and bugs are still being reported. how is this acceptable to any library?

i didn’t expect that the role of an e-resource librarian would be about advocacy but i’m finding more and more of my job is pointing out (mostly politely) to resource providers when their interfaces stink, are not ADA-compliant*, or have errors in the data we get from them. this is an increasing part of my job because the data streams we get from third parties is growing — we now have at least five different ways to get e-book content into our system, for example. if one of those streams goes wonky (technical term) i’d like to find it and report it to our content providers before our patrons do, but i’m only one person and can’t manage that kind of control on all of our data streams. the effect of this is that our patrons find the problems first, and that breaks their trust with us. i don’t want that, and i don’t think any librarian finds it acceptable, but that’s where we are now. until our data providers know that data integrity is critical it won’t be their priority.

and then i saw this, which drives my point home but also made me chuckle:

(screen capture from http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/)

* if you are an e-resources librarian and care about ADA compliance in the resources that your library licenses on behalf of its patrons, consider suggesting the addition of the following clause to the licenses you negotiate:
Compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act. Licensor shall comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), by supporting assistive software or devices such as large print interfaces, voice-activated input, and alternate keyboard or pointer interfaces in a manner consistent with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative, which may be found at http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/#Publications.