Usability, Usefulness and Usage Data

A pilot study of usefulness, as opposed to usability, in a digital health service library’s clinical decision portal moves the discussion of usability beyond the user interface to the practical considerations of supporting decision making at the point of care. Buchanan and McMenemy share their evaluation framework. Data mining of user behaviour is another new area for libraries. Pattern suggests using circulation data to generate recommendations and analysing OPAC keyword searches to create suggestions for search refinement. Huddersfield has released aggregated book usage data and challenges other libraries to do the same

Making Our Scholarly Activity Information Count (MOSAIC)

The project was tasked to investigate the possibilities for exploiting the user activity and resource use data that might currently or potentially be made available through Higher Education systems to benefit libraries, national services and their users. The project generated seven demonstrators, worked with a variety of real library datasets and organised a series of six practitioner and user workshops. In so doing, it gathered a great deal of intelligence about the potential, both possibilities and pitfalls, for individual universities and national services

Making Our Scholarly Activity Information Count: The JISC MOSAIC Project

The project was tasked to investigate the possibilities for exploiting the user activity and resource use data that might currently or potentially be made available through Higher Education systems to benefit libraries, national services and their users. The project generated seven demonstrators, worked with a variety of real library datasets and organised a series of six practitioner and user workshops. In so doing, it gathered a great deal of intelligence about the potential, both possibilities and pitfalls, for individual universities and national services