“If not for SUNCAT I would spend a lot of my time trying to locate material.” Response by an information professional to the SUNCAT Impact Survey.
EDINA newsline
March 2012: Volume 17 Issue 1
“If not for SUNCAT I would spend a lot of my time trying to locate material.” Response by an information professional to the SUNCAT Impact Survey.
All across the ‘JISC family’ we are keen to transform our information about usage of services into knowledge we can share. The purpose is two-fold: to improve the quality of the user experience (for researchers, students and their teachers) and to report back on uptake and impact, nationally and to each university and college.
Last year we investigated how to gain more from the very positive comments we were receiving in user satisfaction surveys and feedback forms. As you would hope, the overwhelming majority found our services easy to use, saved them time or enabled them to do what would otherwise have proved impossible.
As part of the push for quality improvement, we also opted to examine in more detail what negative feedback we could find. The exercise was very useful and informed service development; in addition, a report was sent to JISC and the EDINA Management Board.
The analysis of 7,500 responses to the 2011/12 user satisfaction survey will contribute to the current JISC Portfolio Review of EDINA services and is presented on the EDINA Impact page.
Asking end-users is important, but the ‘middleware services’ we provide as part of digital infrastructure remain invisible to end-users, so we have also gathered feedback about these services from site-reps and others who help make the UK digital library a reality.
Our users – those researchers, students, and lecturers – need to succeed within an institutional and work-based setting. For many years now we have provided registered site-reps at universities and colleges with monthly usage reports and access to archived statistics for a range of online services at EDINA. We are always keen to hear feedback on our services, including the provision of these statistics
As an example of how JISC-funded EDINA services offer value for money, we recently carried out a monetising exercise for the Digimap service which now underpins research projects and coursework. The conservative estimate of the aggregate value of data downloaded and maps printed from Digimap Collections during 2010-11 is £24.8m, on top of the imputed value of providing a world-class online mapping service for 108 universities and 40 colleges. We plan to send organisation-specific estimates to each site-rep.
“Simple to use, very straightforward. The level of information provided with each map is brilliant. The service saves hours and hours of time that can be spent much better elsewhere.”
“I recommend it on a weekly basis to students, colleagues and others. OS maps are the best in the world and having access to such a wide range of their products is an incredible boost to research and teaching.”
“Easy access to the images I needed for my essay – amazingly quick!”
“Sourcing video, images and sound is time consuming and expensive in general.” OpenURL Router: “This service saves so much time, I hope it continues to be funded.”
“[I value the] ability to find relevant information from a single database.”
“Almost all archaeological data has a geospatial component and Unlock Places/Text literally allows us to unlock this information from legacy data.”
“It’s the first point of call when searching for journal holdings to ensure the details are correct, along with finding a potential supplier.”