Some ideas for Lean Library's Library Assist feature - helping users wherever they are

I've always been a big fan of Summon's Best bet feature and Primo's resource recommender. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, it allows the librarian to augment search results users get with additional custom messages or recommendations when they search in Summon or Primo.

So for instance, you could popup a recommendation to databases whose contents are not indexed in Summon/Primo or help workaround known relevancy issues of known item searches .

An example of a "resource recommender" in Primo

In the blog post I wrote that covered some ideas for this feature, I talked about how I loved the feature, as such systems promise to blend the best of the machine smarts with good old librarian know-how.

Still as promising as such systems are, the recommendations are only displayed when the user searches in Summon or Primo and it's well known most of our users do not start at our library pages. How much better would it be if we could reach our users with such advice wherever they were?  In other words, what if we could provide advice at their point of need?

This seems impossible but such a feature potentially exists today in a feature available in Lean Library browser extension.

To clarify Lean Library's browser extension is named "Library Access" in the Chrome store and consists of three modules , "Library Access","Library Alternative" and "Library Assist" (though they are transparent to the user). I'll talk more about the other two modules later, but the main feature we will focus on is Library Assist or Lib Assist.

How it works is , once your user has installed the browser extension , the librarian can setup custom messages to display when users visit specific domains or even pages.

In this blog post, I will share some ideas I have been toying around on how to best use this feature.

Background

For the past month, I have been testing three access broker - browser extensions - Kopernio, Libkey Nomad and Lean Library. IMHO, All three are excellent services in their own right and can be a great aid to providing more seamless access of electronic resources particularly if users are off campus or do not start off a library page.

This is because, all three whether Kopernio, Libkey Nomad or Lean Library can detect when a user is on an article landing page, and redirect the user to a version available via institutional access or failing that try to find a free copy or offer ILL/DDS service. Below, we can see examples of Lean Library in action for all three scenarios.

Lean Library alerting the user to access of the journal article on another platform

Lean Library alerting the user to free OA version

Lean Library supporting one-click ordering of articles that is not available

You can find the same three features in Kopernio (ask to add your institution library link resolver) and Libkey Nomad.

That said they do have differing strengths and additional features unique to each one, but in this blog post, I'm going to focus on the unique Library Assist module available in Lean Library. But what does it do?

Lean Library's Lib assist feature

The idea of this feature is simple, as the user browses the web, the extension is able to popup and display custom messages that the librarian has created in advance based on the URL or domain the user is on.

Some custom messages I have created in Lib assist

Lean Library provides quite a few settings, you can use to set custom messages.

You can choose to display the custom message (up to 350 characters), based on URL, protocol (http/https) and even to take into account whether the user is on campus or off campus (including displaying different messages for both.

You can set a start/end date/time for displaying the message, choose to show message on subpages and configure auto-close timers for the message.

Importantly because this extension also produces popups for the other two modules , Library Access (popups to advise users to proxy by domain) and Library alternative (popups if it is aware an article or book is available elsewhere), you can choose to make the Lib Assist popup a "high priority message").

Currently, there doesn't seem to be a way to send/display custom messages by user group or discipline, but I suppose there are privacy concerns at stake here, though I wonder if this could be done on a opt-in basis.

So how can one use this feature?

Here are some of my current wild ideas.

1.  Access to resources that have unconventional access methods

One of the most basic problems users face when off-campus and not starting off library pages is that they could not be IP recognized when they landed on such resources. Proxy systems, in particular ezproxy was designed to handle this, but most users did not know the workaround of adding the proxy stems to the URL they were on. In the past, one state of art way to solve this was usually to offer a proxy bookmarklet .

Lean Libraries' Library access module solution to this problem was to store a list of domains curated by the library that should be proxied and the extension would automatically offer to proxy those domains for the users.

User googles into Web of Science off campus, Lean Library recognises domain and offers to proxy

Why was this better than the proxy bookmarklet?

Firstly unlike the bookmarklet, the user did not have to remember to click the bookmarklet. Secondly users who remembered to click the proxy bookmarklet were often disappointed when it didn't work because not all domains should be proxied. Eventually they might lose confidence and stop clicking on it.

Lean Library Library access module solves both these problems by automatically proxying only when needed.

Note : A third problem was often the user had access to an article on another platform other than the one he is on is further solved by the Library alternative module in Lean Library. 

It is important to note the key difference between Lean Library and Kopernio/Libkey Nomad is the later two focuses purely on the article level delivery and does not do any proxying by domains, while Lean Library offers proxying by domains as a first cut (whether you are on an article page or not), and then if you are on a page with article information and still don't have access to the journal article, the library alternative module kicks in and works similarly to Kopernio/Libkey Nomad in directing you elsewhere for access.

This two step process seems more indirect to access a journal article, but Lean Library unlike Kopernio/Libkey Nomad can help users with accessing non-journal articles full text databases. For instance it will help users who Google to Web of Science, Scopus, or any non-journal platform or database etc. while off campus. 

However there are many resources that either don't support IP authentication + Ezproxy or requires individual accounts and passwords, or have some unique quirk that made adding the proxy directly unworkable (common for law/business databases/Gale etc).

In such cases, you can have Lib Assist popup a message, giving users instructions on how to access the database.

Custom message on our to access Financial Times for our users advising them how to get their own individual account.

You are not limited to just giving advice on how to access, you can also put in notes on browser requirements etc.

In many cases, the advice you give via the popup message is already typically on your A-Z database/journal/catalog notes, so you can either copy the text and links to put into the custom message (faster access for user) or point them there (easier for house-keeping so you maintain only one source of info).

Custom message that duplicates the information already on our A-Z database list

As such, one way to systematically populate Lib assist with custom messages could be to look at one's A-Z database and take note of resources that need special attention beyond the usual adding of proxy.

2. Redirect to other similar resources

Lean Library's Library Alternative module works to redirect users to journal articles available on other platforms. So if you are on a Wiley page but you have access to the journal article on JSTOR, Library alternative will kick in and redirect you there.

Very nifty but this works for only journal articles.

What about other types of non-journal resources?

Lean Library's go to example for Library assist is of a user going to LexisNexis and getting advice to go Lexisnexis academic.

You can provide custom messages for similar type of resources.

For example, our business and accounting students who love to Google for business reports tend to end up on sites like https://www.researchandmarkets.com/ and many of them will ask the library to buy expensive research reports from there.

User on researchandmarkets.com getting advice to try subscribed databases like Passport

Since this happens with some regularity and the library is very unlikely to buy , it might be a good idea to setup a custom message for that domain to recommend users to try Passport or other subscribed database that is likely to have if not exactly the report they want, a similar version.

3.   Survey for feedback on renewal or trial of database

I once read with interest about MINES - Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services . The idea if I understand correctly was to survey users at the point they were using electronic resources. I wasn't sure how it was done exactly, but it struck me as a very powerful technique , as you were surveying users at the point they were using it as opposed to asking them to recall what they were doing after  the fact.

Custom message of survey feedback for renewal of Web of Science

With LibAssist, if the user has installed the extension, you may have the opportunity to duplicate some of that functionality, which can be very useful.

Imagine a scenario where you are looking to get feedback on renewing Web of Science.

As most librarians know it is often difficult to get user feedback needed for renewals of databases.

Depending on how you setup your ezproxy etc, you might be able to figure out who was your most regular users of a resource, but even if you didn't think it was awkward to outright ask these people , they might not remember really what they were doing at the time.

Now imagine if you setup a Lib assist popup such that for a limited time, users who visited the resource under renewal say Web of Science, would be greeted with a popup asking them to click on a link for feedback.

You would be able to get more anonymous and authentic feedback.

You could do the same with more general surveys like LibQual on strategic sites such as Google, Google Scholar if you felt comfortable doing so.

One of the main weaknesses about using this method of surveying is the bias you are going to get in the sampling, as it is likely users of this extension are different from the general population of your users.

4. Database is down , service outages

Custom popup message about maintenance period 

There isn't much to say about this idea, which is to popup messages about maintenance periods (both scheduled and sudden)  for databases. 

5.  Misc ideas from FAQs

You can think of Lib Assist as an extension of librarian know-how, so one way to source for ideas for these messages is to look at your FAQs.

Assuming you have a properly setup FAQ (aka FAQ built-up and refined based on real user queries as opposed to those you made up from the scratch by imaging what people would ask), this can be a rich source of ideas.

Obviously, if you keep getting the same question, you should see if you can solve the root problem so the question isn't necessary, but if that isn't possible, an FAQ seems to be the next best thing. But this requires the user to actually use the FAQ search. What if some of these FAQs can be provided at point in need?

These are just some ideas of the top of my head, I'm sure there are more ideas .....

Some caveats about the ideas here

While all this ideas look great, they are preconditioned on the fact that it is only effective if enough of your users have this extension installed. There is little point of doing all this work if say only 0.1% of users have it installed. But what is a realistic figure?

I had the privilege of being on a panel with Tim O'Neill of  University of Manchester Libraries at  IGeLU 2019.

The University of Manchester has had Lean Library for a fair amount of time and according to Tim they have 10% of their user base as active users (defined as one use every 30 days) without too much of a big promotion push. This is pretty good but can we do better with a more sustained push?

What if we introduce it at all freshman orientations activities and classes? Roll it out on all campus computers? Offer it as a default install on all new laptops set up by our Campus IT?

Another issue about this I'm pondering about is whether one could go overboard with this and resulting with the user getting bombarded with messages.

It seems to me while some messages should always be helpful, for example a redirect to a URL for access, others can get irritating if it keeps appearing e.g. a feedback request etc.

I suppose users should also have the option to say, dismiss this message and never show anymore.


Acknowledgements  - A lot of this blog post was conceived with discussion and feedback of ideas from Tim O'Neill from University of Manchester Libraries.