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Annual Users' Meeting 2000

Kinetica End-User Survey at La Trobe University, Bundoora Campus
Preliminary Report

 

Period of Kinetica Trial
The KineticaWeb service was made available to academic staff and postgraduate students of La Trobe University as a trial from November 1999. It was also available to undergraduate students but this group was not targeted. The trial was due for completion at the end of June 2000 but has now been extended to December.
Instruction and Documentation
Instructional sessions were held in November when end-user access was first made available. These sessions were advertised in La Trobe’s University News and on email lists maintained by subject librarians. Sessions were also held in February as part of a summer series of information skills sessions for academic staff and postgraduate students held by Reference Staff on electronic resources. Documentation was made available to all staff and students who requested the trial username and password.
Statistics on use by La Trobe University end-users
It is estimated that approximately 80 staff and students have been provided with the trial username and password. For the period November 1999 till 16 May 2000 the following number of searches were made:
NBD RLIN CJK Total
2016 869 473 3358
The heavy use of both RLIN and especially CJK was probably due to the multi-database searching option. Although it was emphasised in training sessions that only one database should be searched at a time due to different searching strategies, many users did not receive detailed training. The multi-database searching option will be removed in the next version of KineticaWeb.
Responses to Kinetica Survey Form
When staff and students requested a Kinetica user name and password they were all given a survey form and asked to return it by the end of February 2000. Twenty users returned the form. These were mainly from the School of Social Science and Humanities (sixteen users), with two from Behavioural Sciences and two from Law and Management. The majority of people who responded were postgraduate students (twelve). There were seven responses from academic staff and one from an undergraduate student.
Results of the Survey Form

Table 1. Kinetica Database

How easy do you find Kinetica for searching? Excellent = 7 Moderate = 12 Poor = 1
Have you used Kinetica to find material with known author or title? Yes = 18 No = 2  
Are your author or title searches successful Frequently = 9 Sometimes = 8 Rarely = 1
Have you used Kinetica to find material by subject? Yes = 16 No = 4  
Are your subject searches successful? Frequently = 7 Sometimes = 9 Rarely = 1
Do you find the screens easy to navigate? Easy = 9 Acceptable = 9 Difficult = 2
Do you find drop down lists of search options convenient? Yes = 15 No = 5  
Do you find search field names clear & meaningful Clear = 1 Acceptable = 12 Difficult = 7
Opinion of response time of Kinetica Excellent = 5 Acceptable = 13 Too slow = 2
Are there too many pages (mouse clicks) to use Yes = 11 No = 9  
How often have you used Kinetica More than once a week = 9 More than once a month = 7 Once or twice = 4
Do you have suggestions to improve searching of Kinetica?
Ten respondents to the Survey made suggestions. These were:
  • It is not entirely clear what the icons at the top right of the screen represent; perhaps more descriptive boxes when the cursor sits on them?
  • The long list of search fields appears to be more suited to librarians than researchers. A short list with Author, title, keyword, Subject etc would be more useful.
  • List search results from latest publication to earliest publication.
  • Have more than ten results displayed at once.
  • Very difficult to use – not programmed for scholarly searching.
  • Messages such as "Target is not available – try again later" do not make sense. These messages could be improved.
  • Improve Boolean searching flexibility and add "Any Keyword" option to RLIN.
  • When in extended view and I toggle to the previous screen I return to the top of the list and not to the record I was examining.
  • A button to clear boxes simultaneously would be appreciated.
  • Need some guidelines on the Search page e.g. search by name doesn’t find the author unless full name or name with a ? entered. Maybe have a page with just author, title, subject/keyword as options.

Table 2. Training and Documentation

Did you receive training Yes = 10 No = 10  
Was this training Specific Kinetica session = 7 Individual training = 3  
How useful was this training? Very useful = 8 Useful = 2 No use = 0
How useful was library documentation? Very useful = 13 Useful = 7 No use = 0
Other Comments on how Kinetica could be improved.
Thirteen respondents to the Survey made further suggestions or comments. I have omitted some which are not relevant for this survey e.g. a request to bypass the logon screen and go straight into the database.
  • Simplified version would be great. Too many fields. Did not uderstand what they all meant.
  • Include search limits such as Language.
  • Definitely some of the terms in the dropdown menus are obscure for non-librarians
  • Some of the drop down options were far too detailed
  • Inadequate emailing and downloading a big disadvantage as I would like to download entries into a bibliography.
  • Email doesn’t seem to work consistently. Record is too long.
  • Email improvements please
  • Email printouts quite long and not useful. Would like to print out lists of brief records instead of cutting and pasting (I think she means download not print possibly)
  • There are problems with printing, downloading and emailing. The process of marking records for emailing is very tedious and not clear. Results are far too long to be of any use with every part of the record on a separate line.
  • Search boxes too inflexible. The keep record does not work.
  • Better output of searches needed (save file/email) – maybe an EndNote compatible import file.
Comments on the Preliminary Results of the Survey
Those users who were most satisfied with Kinetica had all attended training sessions. Training is important in using Kinetica as the database is very different to the indexing and abstracting databases with which staff and students are familiar. Therefore different search strategies need to be used.
It is possible that some of the more favourable results shown by the survey were due to appreciation by staff and student of being able to access this unique database. This was an impression gained by consultations with users.
Undoubtedly the major concern of the respondents was the lack of acceptable downloading and emailing options.

 

Julie Marshall
14/6/00

Draft agenda Kinetica Annual Users' Meeting 2000