Bibliographic displays in OPACs and Web catalogs: How well do they comply with display guidelines?

Information Technology and Libraries

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 1998, Pages 124-134

  Cherry, Joan M ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0032327957     PISSN: 07309295     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (46)

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4. E. Tufte, "The User Interface: The Point of Competition," Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science 18, no. 5 (1992): 15-16.
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32. Galitz, User-Interface Screen Design.
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36. Ibid.
37. Juliana Chan, "An Evaluation of Displays of Bibliographic Records in OPACs in Canadian Academic and Public Libraries," Master of Information Science research project report (University of Toronto: Faculty of Information Studies, 1995).
38. Matthews, "Suggested Guidelines for Screen Layouts and Design of Online Catalogs," 555-70.
39. Galitz, User-Interface Screen Design.
40. Chan, "An Evaluation of Displays of Bibliographic Records in OPACs in Canadian Academic and Public Libraries."
41. Joan M. Cherry and Joseph P. Cox, "World Wide Web Displays of Bibliographic Records: An Evaluation," Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science (Toronto, Ont.: Canadian Association for Information Science, 1996), 101-14.
42. The data for the twelve OPACs were collected between June 9 and 22, 1995. The data for the ten Web catalogs were collected on April 12 and 13, 1996. One might be concerned about possible changes in the systems since they were evaluated. In May 1998 the author accessed the OPACs and Web catalogs again and compared the current displays with screen captures of the displays taken when the data were collected. Seventeen of the twenty-two systems evaluated were still available and could be compared. (In six of the remaining cases, the institution has changed OPAC or Web interface, and in one case the OPAC no longer offers full bibliographic displays to remote users.) In the seventeen systems that could be compared, the displays had changed less than the author expected. The OPAC study was done first and, as we would expect, there were more changes in their displays than in the Web catalog displays. However, major changes were found in displays in only one of the OPACs and only one of the Web catalogs. The displays in some of the systems had not changed at all; some showed minor improvements; and some showed a mix of changes - some for the better, some for the worse.
43. Han X. Lin, Yee-Yin Choong, and Gavriel Salvendy, "A Proposed Index of Usability: A Method for Comparing the Relative Usability of Different Software Systems," Behaviour & Information Technology 16 no. 4/5 (1997): 267-78.
44. Cherry and Cox, "World Wide Web Displays of Bibliographic Records: An Evaluation."
45. Eric Lease Morgan, Online Catalogs with 'Webbed' Interfaces. 1996. URL http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/alcuin/wwwed-catalogs.html.
46. Joan M. Cherry and Paul M. Muter, Finding Information in Bibliographic Displays: Do High Quality Displays Help Users Find Information More Quickly? (unpublished proposal, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, 1998).