Reposted from Booklist’s Points of Reference blog:
During the RBB webinar on June 1st, Power to the User, we discussed and demonstrated a variety of interactive features available in online reference products. At the end of the webinar, everyone had the opportunity to take a survey on these features. The survey listed over 30 interactive features and provided responses of no value, some value, high value, and neutral/no opinion. There were over 100 responses from 87% librarians/library media specialists, 6% library staff, and 2% each of library school students and publishers. There was a nearly even split between public and academic librarians (42% each) and 6% from school libraries. Id like to share some of these results with you.
Interactive features which received the largest percentage of “high value” responses included:
- Videos – 63%
- Customized library links (lead researchers to next step in research process) – 63%
- Embedded dictionary/thesauri – 64%
- Critical analysis of content – 68%
- Citation Builders – 73%
- Search journal content from reference products – 76%
- Did you Mean? spelling suggestions – 80%
- Cross search all reference content in a single platform – 80%
Interactive features which received the highest number of “no value” answers included:
- Saving Searches (track search history) – 6%
- Sharing content (email or making collection of articles public) – 6%
- Download collections of content to a device – 6%
- Side by Side content comparison – - 7%
- Animation – 8%
- Automated reference interviews – 8%
- Location specific results – 9%
- Tagging content for public viewing – 10%
- Editing reference content for personal use – 11%
- Sending/linking content to social networks – 13%
(Note – a similar survey was done in the fall of 2009 for a session at The Charleston Conference. You can find the summary materials here and the follow-up article here in the January 2010 issue of Booklist, sp)
