Last month we reported our attendance at a North West Interlending Partnership meeting in Preston, where we took the opportunity to conduct a quick survey with the participants at the meeting. We have now analysed the responses and the following is a short summary of the findings.
The North West Interlending Partnership provides Inter Library Loan (ILL) support services to libraries in the north west of England. It has a total of 32 partners, including 20 Public Library Authorities; 11 Academic Libraries and one Specialist Library.
- 33% of the respondents had previously used SUNCAT as part of their (Inter-Library Loan) ILL workflow.
- The remaining 67% all indicated that they would now consider using SUNCAT as part of their ILL workflow.
- 76% of the respondents indicated that they would like more public libraries to be added to SUNCAT
- 50% of respondents indicated that they would like more Higher Education and Specialist libraries to be added to SUNCAT
Respondents were also asked to rate the usefulness of five new or potential SUNCAT developments.
- The recent development Listing the holding libraries on the result screen was the most popular development with 100% of the respondents rating this at the top end of the scale.
- The second most popular development was Linking from SUNCAT holdings to the equivalent record on Contributing Libraries’ local catalogues with 86% of the respondents rating this at the top end of the scale.
- The next most popular development was Linking from SUNCAT to Table of Content (TOC) services, e.g. Zetoc with 67% of respondents rating this at the top end of the scale.
- Following this, Integrated presentation and access to SUNCAT, COPAC, Zetoc etc. had 57% of the respondents rating this at the top end of the scale.
- The least popular development was the Integration with ILL request mechanisms which only 43% of the respondents rated at the high end of the scale.
These results were very encouraging for SUNCAT, demonstrating that we are on track with our new and planned developments, but should concentrate on developing deep links to local catalogues and to setting up links to TOC services. The results also highlight that it would be helpful to include more public libraries on the catalogue and to promote the service further to the ILL community.