A day with the SCELC library consortia

Last Wednesday I spent the day at Loyola Marymount University at a SCELC vendor day. We had 6 classroom sessions with libraries in the SCELC consortia where I shared some of the latest screen designs for SRMO. Here’s a photo of one of the sessions – a very smiley group this one was – apologies for the rather blurred image – I have a rather unsteady hand!!

We had some great discussions and I jotted down a few of them that I thought would be interesting to readers of this blog.

“What do you do with visuals in books if you have converted content to XML?”

During the conversion process we are capturing all diagrams and charts as images and they will be displayed in the appropriate place in the converted text.

“Can you turn on print page numbering?”

Yes. Although we have converted each chapter into XML that will be displayed on a single web page, we are also including a button that will allow you to see the print page breaks within the text for the purposes of referencing.

“Have you generated new abstracts for every chapter?”

Believe it or not, we have!

For the last year we have requested our authors to write abstracts for each of the chapters within a book, and for older material within SAGE Research Methods Online we are automatically generating abstracts from the initial sections of each chapter.

“Why are the facets on the right hand side of the search screen?”

We have kept navigational assets on the right hand side of the web page in order to preserve the core material that our researchers are looking for on the left hand side of the page. Research has shown that users automatically look to the left of a web page that they open, so we want to make sure that the information the user is looking to retrieve is displayed in that area of the page, whether that is book content or search results.

“Do you have a text to speech function on the site?”

No we don’t at the moment, but we will certainly add it to our development list. Please let me know if there are other features, particularly in the area of accessibility, that you would like to see on SRMO.

“Multimedia has become really popular, will you produce videos?”

Yes, we are currently recording a small set of video material for the product and we want to test how that is used and what level of value it provides during the beta period later this year. The results of these tests will inform what sort of video material we look to commission in the future, and how we should publish it.

“How much does it cost?”

Pricing for SRMO is currently being finalised and will be available later this year. We will offer a subscription and a purchase model.

“Will you have a bibliography?”

Initially we are looking at just providing SAGE content within the product. We have selected material to cover all areas of the field, using our newly devised taxonomy to plan this out.

If anyone attending one of these sessions is also following the blog, please do add any questions I may have missed and I can answer them here.

If you are not part of the SRMO Group and would like to follow the development, sign up to become a member of the group here.

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New audio: Carol Smart on the impact of qualitative research outside academia