Last year, I noted how the Topeka and Shawnee County Pub­lic Library and oth­ers ana­lyzed the user expe­ri­ence in the cat­a­log and began using Mee­boMe as a way to pro­vide a path out of the “no results” dead end. Now we have another great exam­ple from the Allen County Pub­lic Library of re-examining dead ends in the catalog

Hi-Tech Hi-Touch: A Sirsi Patron Mate­r­ial Request Form

“The point of need that inter­ested me was to make a mate­r­ial request form avail­able for the patron when they could not find their search item.…

The real meat of the pro­cess­ing is han­dled by the findit.php code. This is a reen­trant form that does all the val­i­da­tion and pro­cess­ing. If you would like a copy of the code just email and I will send it to you.” [ACPL’s Inno­va­tion through Tech­nol­ogy]

So basi­cally, Sean Robin­son at ACPL added a pur­chase request form to the search results page of the cat­a­log so that if the Library doesn’t own the title the patron is look­ing for, she can imme­di­ately sub­mit a pur­chase request. It’s these seem­ingly minor improve­ments that pro­vide a more robust ser­vice in a place patrons don’t nor­mally find a librar­ian. Why our ven­dors can’t think of these things is beyond me, but it’s great to see librar­i­ans like Sean tak­ing the ini­tia­tive to imple­ment them.