Christina's LIS Rant

Is that all our vendors hear when they ask us to try out their new interfaces?  A couple of us were kvetching on friendfeed about this.  

Lemme tell you a little story.  A little while ago a really important society publisher in the geosciences re-did all of their web pages and they were pretty - jewel tones (not what I would have chosen, but pretty none the less).  If you had a doi or were using an open URL resolver, you would go straight to the article and be satisfied - I pulled a bunch of articles for people this way and didn't notice.  Then one day, probably 6 months after the site had been re-done, I was on the desk and this very, very, very smart and savvy scientist was completely befuddled.  I asked if I could help, and he asked me to show him how to find the article cited by the article in his hand. I looked, and he was already on the journal web site, you see, because he knows how to go directly from the catalog (yay!).  So we looked, and we looked, and we looked and we clicked, and we clicked.... Whoa, what on earth (or whatever planet this guy studies)?  So then we tried to browse by date - no...  Finally, I looked the stupid thing up in a research database and linked out using Findit - our sfx instance.... and e-mailed it to him.  As soon as I got off the desk, I tried a few more things.  It was really crazy and nothing on the site made sense. So I sent an e-mail to a listserv, asking who is on the library advisory board for the publisher and (well, I guess this publisher knows my place of work) immediately got 2 phone calls and an e-mail from the publisher.  I sent them screen shots and I railed at them... they were extremely concerned and they said:  but we did user testing.  I asked, did you give the user a citation like this one from a reference list and ask them to find the full text?  (no answer so I'm not sure if they did or not). I explained exactly what the problems were, and they made immediate changes - that day, right then, to make the links make sense.  By the next day they had fixed all of their journal pages, and checked back with me that everything was ok.  But what else could they have gotten done if this stuff had come out when they asked originally instead of fixing it in an emergency?

Another case, a large multi-national corporation put up a set of engineering handbooks where you could not find individual books by the title. HELLO! Engineers know the names of their handbooks and don't search across them by subject (in my experience).  Who was the librarian who was cool with the only access being search?

The final case I'll give right now is a database vendor who rushed to catch up with peers and added facets - aren't we happy?  Um. No.  Top facet was United States and the second was Human. Oops - they put the affiliation field and the research subject in a psychology database in with descriptors and identifiers.... But the site was a pretty light blue and green - very springy.

In each of these cases, the vendors had gone out to users and to librarians to get feedback.  They pretty much heard, "oh, that's fine" or "oh, pretty!". Now come on - we are in this together.  If a vendor's interface, policy or whatever is AFU, then darn it, say so. Say exactly what is wrong, where it's failing.  If you have suggestions, tell them.  Run the thing through its paces with actual reference questions - isn't that what you were taught to do when evaluating electronic resources for the collection?  If, when you're using something, it's non-intuitive and you know how to fix it, then talk to the publisher.  I'm not sure if I'm hated or loved, but I try to be pretty blunt:  listen you - this policy won't work, that's not how people work, I can't get it to do what I think it should do.  

Sometimes, when I contact the help desk, I get blown off - if so, I try to dig up a business card from the last conference or an e-mail. If not, I blog it or I post it to the listserv.  Oh, they hate that, but what else am I to do?

Oh, and if you are a scientist or a librarian, and someone from a vendor or your acquisitions department or wherever asks you to look at something - do look at it.  Please.  And seriously, don't be offiended if some for-profit publisher asks for the names of some people who could give them feedback on a product.  I'm not saying - hey you vendor - to go around the librarian and spam the chemistry department. I'm saying that it's ok if you can find some end users who can look at a tool and run real queries against it.