Looking for Trouble (Tickets): A Content Analysis of University of Maryland, College Park E-Resource Access Problem Reports

Fighting an Uphill Battle: Troubleshooting Assessment Practices in Academic Libraries

“…These proposals include updating a local Frequently Asked Questions service page, wherein users could be directed to a "report a problem" link for certain types of outages, and make future changes if a more in-depth analysis revealed additional frequently occurring problems that could be alleviated by providing users with more information. 5 Goldfinger and Hemhauser also proposed adding standardized responses for staff to use in communications when resolving frequently occurring issues. Furthermore, a local internal troubleshooting guide for training purposes could enhance staff understanding of certain issues and provide tips for troubleshooting.…”

“…In addition to providing proposals for enhanced services as a result of the study, Goldfinger and Hemhauser concluded that "Similar future studies at other institutions can surely also suggest local enhancements to optimize the existing troubleshooting framework at each given institution." 6 They encourage other librarians to conduct their own local analyses. 7 Brett at the University of Houston, Lowry at The University of Alabama, and Gould and Brett at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Texas A&M University respectively, examined troubleshooting data in a somewhat different light, wherein rates of access problems across multiple research institutions were used to form a comparative analysis in three different studies.…”

“…6 They encourage other librarians to conduct their own local analyses. 7 Brett at the University of Houston, Lowry at The University of Alabama, and Gould and Brett at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Texas A&M University respectively, examined troubleshooting data in a somewhat different light, wherein rates of access problems across multiple research institutions were used to form a comparative analysis in three different studies. 8 Brett first concluded that it was indeed possible to perform a comparative analysis between institutions when troubleshooting data is analyzed, and illuminated similarities and differences in a comparison between two universities, highlighting where improvements could be made to the University of Houston's services.…”

A Controlled Vocabulary for an Electronic Resources Problem Reporting System: Creation, Implementation and Assessment

“…Goldfinger and Hemhauser described the process used at the University of Maryland, College Park to code trouble tickets to develop a vocabulary that was then used to provide data to aid in answering four questions: who reported problems, how well staff solved problems, to identify the most frequent types of problems, and to determine whether problems could be prevented through proactive work. 10 The authors also described an opportunity to create canned responses to common problems to provide more consistency in answers, and if functionality in their ticketing system that could be used to better advantage. Brett at the University of Houston replicated the process and vocabulary described by Goldfinger and Hemhauser to explore whether the same vocabulary could be used at different institutions.…”

Link Resolver Survival Skills: Using a Team-Based Approach to Diagnosing and Fixing Link Resolver Problems

“…In audits of reported electronic resource access issues, link resolver or knowledge base problems have consistently come up as the most frequent or second most frequent type of issue libraries encounter. 2 Most large-scale audits of electronic resource access problems categorize problems reported to ticketing systems, 3 but at NSC we had a very low volume of issues reported. Rather than looking at how many of our reported problems were related to the link resolver, we wanted to analyze how prevalent link resolver problems were across the collection.…”