On March 18th, the library announced a new way in which to better support its scholars: a new library search interface.
The tool, called Catalyst to emphasize a sense of speed and efficiency, was developed as an open source project by Hopkins software developers to ultimately replace the old search interface, according to David Kennedy, the head of systems for the Sheridan Libraries.
“The [old] interface is not very modern, is not very customizable, and does not suit our users' needs,” Kennedy wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter.
In a user needs assessment conducted in 2008 which included 78 user needs assessment interviews, Kennedy found that the old system needed improvement.
“From that assessment, we developed user personas, and also had some evidence that our interfaces were not meeting the needs of our users, nor were they in keeping with our users’ varied and changing internet behaviors,” he wrote.
After the problem was evaluated, JHU Libraries joined an open source community for a software project called Blacklight, and from there, it built Catalyst.
“Blacklight, as an open source project, originated at University of Virginia,” Kennedy wrote. “Jonathan Rochkind and Sean Hannan [Hopkins software developers], further developed the Blacklight software within the community to the point where it was sufficient to serve the JHU community.”
The cost of developing Catalyst was very small.
“Because we are working with an open source software, the out-of-hand cost was minimal,” Sean Hannan, senior web developer for the Sheridan Libraries, wrote in an e-mail to The News-Letter. “Staff time was the largest cost in the project,” he added.
Created with massive work and lots of collaboration from many other libraries, Catalyst is quite a masterpiece. And yet, most importantly, it was created to fit the needs of the JHU students.
The new search interface is very different from the old ones in many ways. “There are a lot of feature improvements,” Kennedy wrote.
“Catalyst operates with some of the principles that we have learned from our user assessments. And we have designed it so that it fits with the user behaviors that our researchers have become accustomed to on the Internet,” he continued.
To start, Catalyst is simple to work with.
“Catalyst is a more modern interface. Executing a search is made simple and efficient. There is a single search box, like Google, and users are encouraged to enter their search and get results right away,” Kennedy explained.
In addition to simplicity, Catalyst also allows the searcher to refine their queries to an remarkable degree.
“You can ‘build a search’,” Hannan wrote. “For example, you could type in some key words, and then decide that you only want to see things that are in Eisenhower Library. You can limit your search there. Then you can decide that of those results, you only want to see books. You can narrow your search down further,” he wrote.
“Users are then able to easily manipulate results after a search,” Kennedy wrote.
“Catalyst also brings a lot of relevant information right to the interface, such as images of book covers, links to full text, and user reviews from places like Amazon. Catalyst also provides users with the ability to easily grab formatted citations for each record, or export to a citation manager, or e-mail to themselves, or better yet, txt to their phone,” Kennedy wrote.
Catalyst is not a finished product yet.
“This release is a beta release, and we will continue to develop the interface throughout the beta release based on feedback and user assessment,” Kennedy wrote.
But both Kennedy and Hannan hope to replace the old catalog with Catalyst very soon.
“We are looking to replace the old catalog completely this summer,” Hannan wrote.
The larger student body, however, seemed to be largely unaware of this new interface. Of the 10 students asked, only two knew about Catalyst. One of the students who did, freshman Jin Ryang Chung, acknowledged the fact that Catalyst was under-advertised.
“I think the new catalog, Catalyst, is not known to the public because there’s an old catalog still running along with it,” Chung said. “When you log on to the library computers, the main page is still [the] old catalog, and I don’t feel much need to go to the new catalog, especially when you are in a rush.”
But he did think positively of Catalyst. “The new Catalyst is definitely a much easier and faster way to utilize the library resources to their maximum potential,” he said.
Indeed, both Kennedy and Hannan reported positive reactions from those who have heard about the new search interface.
“Since launching the beta two weeks ago, we have received steady feedback from faculty, staff and the general student body,” Kennedy wrote. “The feedback received so far has been overwhelmingly positive, that the Catalyst interface is a great improvement over the old catalog.”
“Some users have very kindly pointed out areas that could be improved for their particular uses and fields of study,” Hannan added.
In addressing the problem of under-advertisement, Hannan described efforts to better promote Catalyst.
“We are trying a number of new (for the library) promotion strategies with Catalyst. This includes getting the word out through our Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/mselibrary) and Twitter account (http://twitter.com/mselibrary)," Hannan wrote.
In addition, the MSE Library is currently holding user testing on Catalyst from April 5th to April 15th, with a $10 Amazon gift card as reward for giving opinions and feedbacks.
“We welcome all of this feedback, after all, we can't make a better tool for you to use if you don't tell us how you use it.”
