Where Do Our Problems Lie?: Comparing Rates of E-Access Problems Across Three Research Institutions

Fighting an Uphill Battle: Troubleshooting Assessment Practices in Academic Libraries

“…9 In 2020, Lowry built upon Brett's study to include a third institution in a comparative analysis and iterated that as a result of both a comparative and local analysis of troubleshooting tickets, the best course of action for The University of Alabama Libraries would be to "empower public services faculty and staff to better understand and report access issues so that frustrations are minimized." 10 Lowry indicated that the results of the study "are highly indicative that research libraries experience some types of access problems at approximately the same rates," and that efforts to improve discovery should be "at the forefront of the minds of librarians when communicating and negotiating with vendors." 11 Finally, Gould and Brett compared rates of access problems at the University of Tennessee and Texas A&M University, ultimately advocating for a standardized or controlled vocabulary to be establish by librarians and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to foster collaboration between institutions and to simplify the process of comparing outages across institutions to improve e-access for all library patrons.…”

“…10 Lowry indicated that the results of the study "are highly indicative that research libraries experience some types of access problems at approximately the same rates," and that efforts to improve discovery should be "at the forefront of the minds of librarians when communicating and negotiating with vendors." 11 Finally, Gould and Brett compared rates of access problems at the University of Tennessee and Texas A&M University, ultimately advocating for a standardized or controlled vocabulary to be establish by librarians and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) to foster collaboration between institutions and to simplify the process of comparing outages across institutions to improve e-access for all library patrons. 12 Taking a slightly different approach, Ashmore and Macauly of Samford University analyzed unfilled interlibrary loan (ILL) requests to detect patterns.…”

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.…”