Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The good thing about this new program is that the catalog has better search results. I used to enter an item for a subject search and only get items from a title search.  Now the subject search works great, but another problem is that if you misspell a search term there are no "suggestions" with correct spellings.  

I think amazon.com should sell their database information to libraries so they get an expanded amount of information and subject searchings, except the catalogs would be individualized for each library.   

Monday, November 24, 2008

The library where I work recently updated its circulation program.  The problem with this "upgrade" is that it is a whole lot slower than the older version and a user has to click twice as much to reach one tool.  The machines we use are about five years old and constantly lock up when they are over exerted.  I believe if our machines were newer the circulation program would be faster, but that does not fix the amount of clicking.

It is as if the programmers did not ask anyone who uses the program on a day to day basis how to improve it.  It is easier to access some information, but what used to be easy is now harder.

There needs to be collaboration between the programmers and the users to create a program that is an improvement rather than a hindrance.