The user satisfaction survey has been extended until Friday 5th June. We would be very grateful if you would take a few minutes to give us your feedback.
Once again, thank you to everyone who has responded already!
Jun 012015
May 272015
A reminder that the user satisfaction survey will close in a few days on Friday 29th May.
We would be really grateful if you could take a few minutes to give us your feedback as it helps us to identify any issues and forms the primary input for our future development plans.
A huge thank you to all who have responded so far!
May 182015
After the launch of the new look service last spring we asked you to give us your opinion of the new interface and features. We thank all of you who responded to this survey, the results have fed back into the service and we are using your comments to inform the continued development of the SUNCAT interface.
You can view a summary of the last survey, with a list of the planned actions resulting from this.
This year we would again appreciate your input to help us improve the service by answering some slightly different questions.
Your feedback is vital in helping us to identify and prioritise areas for further development, so we would be very grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete this survey which will remain open until Friday 29th May.
We would not only appreciate your comments but would also encourage you to circulate the survey details as widely as possible, both to your colleagues and end-users.
Thank you in anticipation!
Apr 172015
Two of the SUNCAT Bibliographic Team will be at events in London this Monday 20th April. Celia will be attending the ARLIS workshop ‘Taking the plunge: art librarianship as a career option’, which will be held at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). It is going to be a very interesting day, which will see speakers from academic through to museum libraries cover many aspects of being an art librarian and dealing with information from art, design and architecture. Moira will be attending the EPUG-UKI (Ex Libris Products User Group, UK and Ireland) meeting and AGM 2015, to be held at the British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras. The day will also comprise of updates from Ex-Libris and presentations from EPUG members.
Whether you are from a Contributing Library or not please do come and say hello to Celia or Moira if you see them!
Apr 152015
The FTP server that our Contributing Libraries use to send us their updates will be unavailable for a short time, between 5 and 6pm next Wednesday 22nd April, to allow for essential maintenance. This means that it won’t be possible to transfer any files in this time period.
If you are a SUNCAT Contributor please pass this on to whoever is responsible for sending your update files.
If you have any queries or concerns about the above please contact the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.
Mar 272015
The SUNCAT team will once again be at the UKSG Annual Conference, which this year is to be held in Glasgow next week from the 30th March to the 1st of April.
For those of you who don’t know, UKSG is an organisation which “exists to connect the knowledge community and encourage the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. It is the only organisation spanning the wide range of interests and activities across the scholarly information community of librarians, publishers, intermediaries and technology vendors”.
We shall be attending the plenary sessions and various breakout sessions. If you come across us please do say hello! We will also be giving a demo of the new-look SUNCAT service at the Jisc exhibition stand (Stands 35 and 37) on Tuesday 31st March during the lunchtime. We will tweet more specific details on the demo closer to the time. If you have any questions about SUNCAT or want to arrange a separate demo please do pop along to the Jisc stand.
Other EDINA services and projects will also be represented at UKSG. There will be a short demo of The Keeper’s Registry by Lisa Otty at the Jisc stand. Look out for details on this @keepersregistry. There will also be a Group A breakout session entitled ‘Hiberlink: Threat and Remedy of Reference Rot in Online Scholarly Statement’ and given by Peter Burnhill, Muriel Mewissen and Richard Wincewicz on Monday 30th and Tuesday 31st March.
You can follow the conference through the UKSGLive blog (which SUNCAT members Paula and Celia will be contributing to), as well as on Twitter @UKSG and using the hashtag #UKSG15. SUNCAT will also be tweeting @suncatteam. Whether you will be at the conference, or following it online, we hope you have a really interesting and enjoyable conference.
Feb 172015
The article ‘SUNCAT: Ten Years and Beyond’ has just been published in Ariadne, the Web Magazine for Information Professionals Issue 73.
The article has been written by Celia Jenkins, SUNCAT Bibliographic Assistant – with help from her SUNCAT colleagues. It charts the beginnings of SUNCAT, from 2003 onwards, and the ways it has developed over the last ten years and more to meet the challenges and changes in scholarly communication and technology. This has included the addition of new Contributing Libraries (now totalling the magic number of 100), and the ability to link to the Table of Contents of a journal and to the full-text of the article where available. SUNCAT has also been working with other initiatives in the serials domain, such as The Keepers Registry and UKRR, to help deliver improved services to all with an interest in serials. Back in Spring 2012, SUNCAT began a process of re-development inside and out, which has been very much informed by end-user feedback. This work has already resulted in a new and much improved interface, with increased functionality, and this is continually being refined. The future of SUNCAT is a very exciting one, which is mirrored by the new possibilities now presenting themselves in the digital landscape.
We hope you enjoy reading the article!
Jan 262015
We are very pleased that SUNCAT has just added its 100th Contributing Library, the National Archives. Reaching 100 Contributing Libraries is a landmark for SUNCAT highlighting it as the most comprehensive source of journal holding information in the UK. SUNCAT contains the holdings of all the UK legal deposit libraries:
• British Library
• National Library of Scotland
• National Library of Wales
• Trinity College, Dublin
• University of Cambridge
• University of Oxford
In addition, it has over 50 Higher Education Libraries from across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, including all those of the Russell Group.
SUNCAT also has a range of specialist libraries covering a wide variety of disciplines including art; music; history; medicine; science; horticulture and the environment.
By incorporating information from all these libraries SUNCAT can help you uncover new or unique journals in a particular field, help you locate copies held closest to you or where you can apply for a copy of an article. The service can also highlight those journals which are widely held and more importantly where the one or two copies of more unusual titles are available.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our Contributors for working with us to keep SUNCAT as comprehensive, accurate and current as possible!
To find out more information and directions to all the locations of each of the 100 Contributing Libraries click on the library locations map.
We are not stopping at 100 libraries and are keen to add more UK Higher Education, Specialist and Public Libraries, so if you are interested in contributing please see the earlier Contributing to SUNCAT is easy post.
For further information and news about SUNCAT please see our website, follow SUNCAT on Twitter (@suncatteam), or contact the EDINA helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk.
Dec 082014
Issue 12 of the SUNCAT Newsletter (December 2014) is now available on our website. It provides a round up of the SUNCAT news and developments for this year, including information about:
- New libraries (we have almost reached 100 contributors!)
- Ten years of SUNCAT
- The new SUNCAT platform
- Future developments
- Details of the latest survey
- RDA and SUNCAT
- Events, presentations and articles
Please get in touch if you have any questions or comments about the contents.
For further information about SUNCAT please see our website, follow our news on Twitter @suncatteam, or contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk
Nov 052014
I attended the Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2014 Conference at Olympia a couple of weeks ago and found the opportunity to talk about our experience of transforming SUNCAT, learning about the latest library trends and generally meeting follow Librarians very useful.
My presentation is available on the SUNCAT website but unfortunately the other presentations from the conference are password protected.
After mistakenly trying to join some of the numerous other conferences taking place at Olympia at the same time some of the highlights for me included:
The opening keynote from Michael Edson of the Smithsonian who talked about the dark matter of the Internet – the huge amount of cultural activity on the Internet which is valuable but difficult to capture so is not well covered by our cultural institutions. He made particular reference to the Vlog Brothers who you can check out at http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers
A number of the speakers spoke extensively about or at least touched upon the changing and new roles available for Librarians with the advent of new trends and technologies. Developments in publishing, open access, open source, mobile apps and research data management were highlighted by Brian Kelly (CETIS) as key findings from the 2014 NMC Horizon Report for Libraries.
Suzanne Enright from the University of Westminster described how they used Agile Methodology to develop a Virtual Research Environment, while Mary Antonesa from Maynooth University Library presented on the development of a simple directional app to assist users find locations and items.
Ben Showers Head of Scholarly and Library Futures at Jisc encouraged us to follow three principles when collecting and measuring metrics:
- Principle 1: Measure what really matters, not just what you can get data for
- Principle 2: Don’t collect or measure if you are not going to act on it.
- Principle 3: Make as much of your data available as possible.
And finally of great interest was the presentation around engaging users in the tender exercise for a new LMS and discovery tool at the Open University. This included setting up a user panel, interview and observation sessions and creating wireframe prototypes to gather initial feedback. Sodertorn University in Sweden also conducted similar exercises with users and discovered the importance of:
- Relevance ranking
- Terminology is vital – we should avoid using too much library lingo in discovery system
- Facets should be highlighted so that users don’t overlook them
All very helpful as we continue to develop the SUNCAT service…