"To sleep,
perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub"
-- In William Shakespeare's play Hamlet
PROMOTING DATBASE USE: The Three
S’s
OK, so you have identified the databases your researchers will need, and
you’ve negotiated favorable terms to provide access to these databases. Breathe
a sigh of relief. But only one sigh,
please, because your work is not yet done.
The next step is to make your people aware of the information products, and to
encourage them to use the products. Experienced librarians can tell you that the
mere availability of these products does not guarantee their use. If your
researchers don’t take advantage of the vast array of information offered by
these products, you might as well save some money by cancelling your
subscriptions.
In “Turning ‘Cold Sellers’ Into ‘Must Haves’:
Marketing Unsought Library Products,” Julie Badger of Swinburne University of
Technology provides a framework for tackling this problem. She writes …
“The 2003 OCLC environmental scan:
pattern recognition” indicates that library users value “self-service, satisfaction and seamlessness” and that ease of use, convenience and availability
are more important than information quality or trustworthiness.
Self-Service
Self-service is easy. Every
major purveyor of information designs its system for ease of use. Once a researcher has been made aware of its
existence, using the product will follow, as long as it leads to …
Satisfaction
If your researcher is dissatisfied with the results of his/her search,
he/she will not continue to use the product.
If you have selected the right products, satisfaction will follow.
Seamlessness
Aye, there’s the rub!
People are used to the ease of Googling. The more hoops an end user has to jump
through, the less likely he/she is to use an information product.
Requiring a searcher to logon to a product in order to search it is a common
hurdle that discourages use.
Bibliographic databases like Compendex pose another challenge. Compendex is tremendously useful in
identifying useful articles, but the fact that a searcher then has to go
elsewhere to obtain the full text of the articles may discourage use of the
product.
Regarding bibliographic databases, Badger has this to say …
Finally there are the “dogs”, products
with a subordinate share of the market and low prospects for growth. Sometimes
we need to make the tough decision to euthanize these “dogs”. Into this
category I would put all the index/abstract-only databases unless there is a
very real possibility that they will provide full text soon.
I wouldn’t go that far. But it is very
difficult to persuade busy researchers to take the extra time required to mine
the benefits of such products.
Time, as they say, is of the essence. If
you can persuade your end users that using the subscribed databases will
actually SAVE them time, you are half way there to ensuring that they will be
used.
The best thing you can do is to talk to some of your researchers. Ask them to give you a few topics to research
for them. Do the research, and show them
the results. Then show them how you got those results. Some of them will take
the bit and run with it. Others will
prefer you to do their online searching for them. Either way, your organization wins.
For larger organizations, this sort of one on one approach may not be
sufficient. In this case, you will want
to use some of the media used by academic librarians to promote the use of
subscribed databases. They include …
- Information literacy sessions
- Induction sessions
- In person instruction
- e-mails
- Posters
- Committee meetings
- Events
- Newsletters
- Flyers
- Social Media Tools, such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wikis, Online groups/forums, Blogging
Remember, for more tips and tricks, visit
www.jeansteinhardtconsulting.com
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