ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 62 | April 2003
Kinetica Developments Customer Input Shapes Future Work
Kinetica has now been providing support for resource sharing for Australians and Australian libraries in its current form for over four years. During this period customers have provided advice and recommendations on developments to our cataloguing, searching and document delivery services. The National Library values input from custumers and last year established the Expert Advisory Group on Enhancements (EAGOE) to provide a formal means of investigating and prioritising enhancements to Kinetica services. The work of the group has built upon the recommendations for future enhancements made by the Reference and End User Services and Kinetica Document Delivery Expert Advisory Groups in 1999.
Customer feedback and suggestions are considered a high priority by the National Library for planning of developments in the Kinetica service. The Expert Advisory Group on Enhancements (EAGOE) was required to:
After an initial meeting the group took an active role in seeking input from Kinetica users in all States and Territories. A web form was created to enable anyone to lodge comments. Workshops were held in every State and Territory. In all approximately 260 attended meetings around Australia and very actively discussed their needs and provided recommendations for enhancements to the Kinetica service.
A final report was provided to the National Library and the Kinetica Advisory Committee in March, which lists and prioritises all 274 recommendations made by customers. The report is now available online <www.nla.gov.au/kinetica/eag_enhance.html>.
So what will happen now? All the recommendations have been reviewed to see if they can be delivered through development by the National Library, by our contractor, or whether the work would need to be done by the software supplier. Information on the timeframes and resource issues, particularly for the high priority recommendations, is being collected and reviewed by the National Library.
For KineticaWeb, five of the high priority enhancements are included in Kinetica’s development planning, these being: the ability to proceed straight to extended view when less than three hits are returned, or to short view when there are 10 hits or less; the merging of result sets from searches of multiple databases; and a simplified workflow for marking and saving records for inclusion in bibliographies. All will be reviewed with the software supplier in the next two months. Of the other high priority recommendations only the suggestion of enabling access to KineticaWeb via protocol authentication systems will need more investigation.
There were seven suggested enhancements to Kinetica’s Z39.50 search engine, four of which were high priority. All these have been included in Kinetica’s development plan and information on development possibilities is being sought.
The Kinetica Client was an area where there were a large number of enhancements suggested, many of them high priority. All have been acknowledged and are being pursued with a view to developments in Amicus software.
The Kinetica Document Delivery (KDD) system was another service category which received a high number of requested enhancements, of which 10 were rated of high importance. To an extent, the amendments to the system delivered by the December 2002 upgrade have been successful in addressing several ongoing problems such as system timeouts, and the removal of inappropriate actions from the drop-down menus. The improved interoperability has also made possible a link to Te Puna, operated by the National Library of New Zealand, which will soon enable libraries in Australia and New Zealand to cross-search their national databases, and exchange interlibrary loan requests. The 2003 upgrade should also deliver better search functionality, so that users will no longer have to search across the different Kinetica interfaces in order to access the full range of search functions, thereby saving time and costs. All are being raised for incorporation into future VDX developments—Virtual Document Exchange (interlibrary lending software).
We will report to Kinetica users annually on the achievement of enhancements
listed on the development plan and will also consider the enhancement list through
an annual review with State user groups. In the meantime we welcome comments
from users on Kinetica. Please do not hesitate to contact the Kinetica Helpdesk
on 1800 026 155 or kinetica@nla.gov.au
to pass on your comments and suggestions.
—Sophie Powell & Roxanne Missingham
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