SUNCAT user satisfaction survey

SUNCAT conducted an impact and satisfaction survey in April 2009. The majority of the 69 respondents were library or information professionals but there were also responses from a small number of researchers, lecturing staff and postgraduates.

Responses confirmed SUNCAT’s primary purpose as a serials location tool with around two-thirds of the respondents using the service to find where specific serials are held in the UK. Other purposes included:

checking if specific titles are held in particular libraries, cities or regions
checking the bibliographic details of serials
using SUNCAT records to improve or create local library serials’ records

Specific examples of usage also highlighted that SUNCAT regularly saved library staff time and money when trying to locate serials:

“SUNCAT is invaluable in helping me locate libraries that hold journals when the British Library is unable to satisfy inter-library loan requests. SUNCAT is my first choice for serials location checking. It is easy to use and has exceptional coverage. I use it daily to trace journals and correct reference information. It has speeded my work up tremendously since its introduction and I’d be lost without it.”

Desirable improvements or developments for the service which were highlighted included:

addition of more contributing libraries
reduction of duplication on the catalogue
linking from records on SUNCAT to equivalent records on libraries’ local catalogues
linking from SUNCAT records to Table of Contents services, e.g. Zetoc

Potential Web 2.0 developments received little support from the respondents but there was interest in personalisation features. The most popular of these were:

saving records across sessions
saving searches across sessions
location based results based on users’ preference settings

A number of these improvements are already in development. The team are currently adding some new libraries, and more are planned in the near future. Linking SUNCAT records to Table of Contents services is currently being developed as part of the Discovery to Delivery project (see link below) and location-based searching on SUNCAT is also being investigated as part of the JISC IE Personalisation project (see link below).

Finally, 92% of respondents indicated their overall level of satisfaction with SUNCAT as “Good” or “Excellent”.

This is excellent news for SUNCAT, with high levels of satisfaction for the existing service and positive support for developments in progress. The team realise, however, that there is still much work to be done to ameliorate the effects of duplicate records on the catalogue while also adding more new libraries to further improve the coverage and value of the service.