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OpenURL Router 2012/2013

EDINA ran a customer survey of Open URL Router service between December 2012 and January 2013. The survey link was sent to an email list of the 104 support librarians and administrators who are the main institutional contacts for EDINA. Comments from the respondents are displayed in appropriate sections and all comments from the survey will be considered for future service development.

22 responses were received. A summary of the results is presented below:

Is it easy to administer?

The Open URL Router aims to provide an easy to manage middleware tool. 14 (64%) felt that the service was Very Easy or Easy to administer. Only 2 (9%) believed it was difficult and 6 (27%) found it neither easy nor hard.

Does it save time?

One of the chief purposes of the service is to save time. The question we asked this year was whether respondents’ work would take longer if the OpenURL Router Service were not available. Their responses were positive with 14 of the 22 respondents either agreeing strongly agreeing that the service saved them time. A further seven were neutral and only one disagreed with the statement.

A supplementary question asked for reasons behind the responses. Several comments were made, including:

• It saves me having to contact all vendors with new details when we change our base URL.
• Very much easier to handle base URL changes: just update the Router information and job done instead of contacting a myriad suppliers.
• It is very handy being able to pass everything through the router as we then only have one place where we need to change the settings.

Can you think of alternatives?

We consider the OpenURL Router to be a highly original service. To test this proposition we asked for suggestions of alternative services were the OpenURL Router not available. Five of the respondents offered suggestions, three could think of none whilst 14 didn’t know.

Of the five suggestions listed below, four describe varying methods the institution would implement providing local management essentially equivalent to OpenURL Router functionality but specific to their own institutional resolver. The second suggestion recognises that a service (likely a free service) that uses openurl.ac.uk in all their OpenURL links would not be able to link to their local resolver:

• We could re-direct from a website, but not collect statistics or build recommender services.
• We would perhaps create a local script to add a level of indirection, but this would not help free service providers.
• Would use our 'native' openurl domain.
• Locally created resolver redirect.

The 5th suggestion:”Contact any service providers directly“ is not an alternative but rather how the institution would need to manage referral to their openurl resolver if the Router were not available. It does highlight the institutional activity that is avoided by having the Router service.

We also asked for brief details of any other related services respondents would like to see EDINA offer, or anything else they wanted to tell us with regard to the OpenURL Router service. The following four additional comments were made:

• It would be useful to be able to change the configuration locally, but the helpdesk is usually really quick and helpful in responding.
• I'd really like to see usable statistical information. Also can the data from OpenURL be used to create an article recommender service? I know there has been a JISC project on this but it doesn't seem to have produced any usable outcomes.
• We are interested in this [making configuration changes using the OpenURL Router service?] and will investigate when we acquire a discovery solution.
• It would be great if there were a "systems librarian" option which, by setting a cookie, would prevent the router sending us through to our own resolver. We could then more easily compare our resolver's performance with that of other universities.

Would you recommend it?

As in previous years the satisfaction level was high in terms of those willing to recommend to the service to others. This year equal numbers “Strongly agreed” and “Agreed” (nine for both categories) with the remainder (four) “Neither agreeing nor disagreeing”. None of the respondents disagreed, that they would recommend it.

The survey then asked reasons why respondents would, or would not, recommend this service. The following five comments were made:

• Without this service I would have to update several dozen publishers website[s] with our OpenURL link resolver and/or button if we changed these.
• Very much easier to handle base URL changes: just update the Router information and job done instead of contacting [..] myriad suppliers.
• [The] service is sometimes available in origins where you have not actively integrated your own resolver (e.g. Eprints and Mendeley) so it's worth using [..] to expand access to your resources beyond your subscribed citation databases.
• Because it is the only option I know of!
• If it makes accessing content easier, then it has got to be a good thing.

Rating potential service developments

Respondents were asked to complete the following grid of suggestions from past surveys. As it was mandatory the totals equal 22 responses.

	Important	Useful	Little value	Don't know
a. Allow checking and updating of configuration locally.	5	13	3	1
b. Provide usage statistics to institutions.	10	8	2	2
c. Provide logs to institutions of service providers using the Router to link to their institution.	8	10	3	1
d. Provide a list of institutions that have registered their resolvers.	1	10	10	1
e. Offer improved mechanisms for institutions to view their OpenURL Router usage data.	7	10	3	2
f. Include a link test for each resolver registered as part of the service.	7	10	2	3
g. Improve customisation options to accommodate institutional logo.	5	10	6	1
h. Improve information pages on how to update existing configurations.	6	12	1	3

The purpose of this exercise was to seek confirmation that the suggestions from previous surveys had wider interest from the service-community following on from their initial suggestion.

The responses in the above table validate that point, with the majority of respondents marking all of the suggestions as Important or Useful. The two most well received items (b. and c.) related to the provision of usage and log data to institutions. The item with least perceived value was the provision of an institutional list. Improved logo customisation was also a lesser rated potential feature. All of the items will be considered for development and an update provided later in 2013.