Federal Science eLibrary Pilot Project Final Report

Appendix C - Institute of Ocean Sciences/Pacific Geoscience Centre Site Visit

Objective

To speak with pilot users one on one about their attitude towards desktop access to e-journals and observe first hand their "As-Is" environment.

Methodology

The project coordinator made a site visit to the Institute of Ocean Sciences/Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sidney, British Columbia. Pilot site librarian Pam Olson hosted and arranged for a presentation on the pilot project to be included with a presentation already scheduled on the institute's current access to e-journals.

During the site visit, information was collected for the "As-Is" analysis through discussions with the pilot site librarian and a presentation on electronic resources for the institute given by the pilot site librarian. The pilot project coordinator gave a presentation on the pilot project, a demo of NRC-CISTI's infostructure including a question and answer session and held one-on-one discussions with users. The pilot project coordinator and pilot site librarian also conducted four usability feedback sessions on the infostructure interface with users.

Results

General Observations

The institute is a co-location, housing both Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Natural Resources Canada. Both departments share the same library site and library staff but library budgets, access rights to e-journals and departmental networks remain separate. The Natural Resources Canada side of the library has much better access to electronic resources than the Fisheries and Oceans Canada side. This made the institute an interesting location to study the effects on users of unequal access to e-journals.

Results from presentation question and answer

The main issues presented by researchers were:

• Inequality of access - there were strong feelings about the fact some researchers in the building had much better desktop access than others.
• Breadth of content - there was great interest in expanding the content of the site, particularly in adding society publications and older materials.
• Archival issues - users feared losing access to older materials. They asked questions regarding permanent storage for e-journals.
• One interface to all content was a very popular concept. Being able to access all content through one interface was obviously important to this user group.
• What comes after the pilot? Researchers liked the pilot site and wondered what would be available to them after the pilot ended.

Results from one-on-one discussions

Discussions after the presentation involved many questions on functionality and a few very interesting questions from three researchers doing fieldwork. Two worked in the field and one at sea. Their fieldwork often lasted months at a time and they would be outside the IP range allowed during the pilot. They explained the difficulties of trying to do research without access to information and were very eager for any future eLibrary to be accessible to them during their fieldwork.

Results from usability feedback sessions

Positive aspects about Journals Onsite interface:

• Quick access to PDF articles
• Ability to access several publishers through one interface

Improvement areas for Journals Onsite interface:

• Site navigation problems need to be addressed. Ex/Back button functionality from any number of pages was problematic and annoying.
• Slowness of browsing needs to be addressed.
• Citation export functionality needs to be better developed.
• More support for inexperienced searchers. Several participants used the available search interfaces incorrectly and came back with 0 results for searches which should have produced thousands of hits. Participants wanted more hints on search techniques and how search tabs were used.
• Difficulties understanding the full-text vs non-full-text concept. Some users would click links to articles with only metadata attached and expect to find the full-text.