The seventh issue of the SUNCAT Newsletter is now available on the website at http://www.suncat.ac.uk/news/newsletters.html
This issue includes information about
Two members of the SUNCAT team, Natasha Aburrow-Jones and Moira Whitson, will be attending the UK Serials Group (UKSG) conference in Torquay next week, March 30th to April 1st.
Natasha and Moira will be attending the sessions (and no doubt the social gatherings!), but you will find them at the Edina stand at break times. Please take a few minutes to visit the EDINA stand to pick up the latest SUNCAT Newsletter, to ask any questions you have about SUNCAT or just to catch up on the latest news.
We would be grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete a SUNCAT satisfaction survey at https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/suncatsurvey
The aims of the survey are to discover how SUNCAT is being used, its impact on users' work and research, and the current level of satisfaction with the service. The results of the survey will help the SUNCAT team to identify and prioritise improvements and future developments for the service.
The survey will be available until Friday 10th April, when completed surveys will be entered into a draw for £50 of Amazon vouchers.
We would be grateful for your comments and would also encourage you to circulate the survey details as widely as possible, both to library staff and users.
Thanks in advance!
SUNCAT has been updated. Updates from the following libraries were loaded into the catalogue in the past week. The dates displayed indicate when the files were received by SUNCAT.
SUNCAT has been updated. Updates from the following libraries were loaded into the catalogue in the past week. The dates displayed indicate when the files were received by SUNCAT.
We conducted a survey at the end of last year as a follow-up comparison study to the duplication survey conducted with SUNCAT Contributing Libraries in June 2007. Since the last survey a number of changes have been made to SUNCAT in an attempt to ameliorate the effects of duplication on the catalogue. The aim of this survey was to ascertain if these changes had any significant impact on respondents’ experience and tolerance of duplication on SUNCAT.
The results from the survey with SUNCAT Contributing Library staff could not confirm any significant change in the level of duplication in SUNCAT, however, they did highlight that user perception of the issue had improved. In the original survey conducted in June 2007, respondents found 28% of the searches produced an unacceptable level of duplication, however in this most recent survey this figure was reduced to 15% of the searches conducted. Further, the percentage of searches producing an acceptable number of searches increased from 38% to 54%.
The original survey suggested that it would be desirable to reduce the number of duplicate records for each journal title to a maximum of three, but that a maximum of seven duplicate records would be considered workable by the majority of users. However, this latest survey suggested that a maximum of five records would be desirable but that anything up to around ten records might be considered workable.
This apparent improved level of tolerance for duplication in the catalogue is most likely due to the addition of the institutions holding each title to the search results display. This change dramatically reduced the number of records respondents had to enter to check a particular institution’s holdings for a title. Further, 80% of the respondents indicated that the change to the interface had made either a significant or major improvement to their experience of searching SUNCAT.
SUNCAT Search results page displaying holding librariesSUNCAT has been updated. Updates from the following libraries were loaded into the catalogue in the past week. The dates displayed indicate when the files were received by SUNCAT.
