Nina McHale
Margaret Brown-Sica
LITA Forum 2010
Forthcoming:
Margaret Brown-Sica, Jeffrey Beall, and
Nina McHale, “Next-Generation Library
Catalogs and the Problem of Slow
Response Time,” Information Technology
and Libraries, Volume 29/4, December
2010, 207-216.
Are
NextGen catalogs—or
traditional catalogs that add
NextGen content—too slow?
Do 2.0/NextGen features slow
them down too much?
 Yup.
 Features
such as cover art, reviews,
tagging, etc., can significantly increase
the amount of data, and therefore time,
required to return a catalog record page.
 Performance factors, particularly speed,
should be required criteria for librarians
and vendors evaluating and designing
products.
 W3C
does not set forth standards
 Jakob Nielsen
• 0.1 of a second: feels “instantaneous”
• 1.0 second: feels “uninterrupted”
• 10 seconds:
 “About the limit for keeping the user’s attention
focused on the dialogue.”
 Give the user “time-remaining” feedback
Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering (San
Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1994) 135.
 During
a busy time during the semester,
we recorded response times in seconds
of permalinks for three catalog records
 Tested our classic/NextGen catalogs and
three others
 3 books, 5 catalogs, 3 times per day for
13 days=585 data points
 Collecting several data points in this way
using www.websitepulse.com ensured
that data was consistent
 Library
of Congress Catalog
• Voyager
• Traditional catalog
 University
of Texas at Austin
• Innovative Interfaces
• Traditional catalog with added NextGen elements
 University
of Southern California
• Sirsi/Dynix
• Traditional catalog with added NextGen elements
 Hard
Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction
Experience. Washington, DC: Special
Inspector General, Iraq Reconstruction,
2009. (OCLC number 302189848)
 Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On
(Not) Getting by in America. 1st ed. New
York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. (OCLC
number 256770509)
 Langley, Lester D. Simón Bolívar: Venezuelan
Rebel, American Revolutionary. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, c2009.
(OCLC number 256770509)

http://aurarialibrary.worldcat.org/oclc/302189848

http://skyline.cudenver.edu/record=b2433301~S0

http://lccn.loc.gov/2009366172

http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/record=b7195737~S29

http://library.usc.edu/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchd
ata1=2770895{CKEY}
 WebSite
Pulse™
• www.websitepulse.com
• Allows testing on any web page/site; does not
require server installation
 Similar
services:
• websiteoptimization.com
• browsermob.com
• tools.pingdom.com
• your favorite?
 Horizontal
bar:
• Gives visual representation of load time for each
item (image files, javascript files, style sheets,
etc.)
• Provides quick indication of “sticking points”
 Table:
• provides specifics about file size and delivery
time for each
• DNS, Connect, Redirect, First Byte, Last Byte,
Error
 Auraria’s
Skyline: 1.2930
 Auraria’s WCL: 11.5734
 Library
of Congress: 2.1530
 University
of Texas at Austin: 3.4997
 University
of Southern California: 4.1085
 After
data was analyzed, we took a closer
look at each individual catalog, using the
Hard Lessons catalog record
 WebSitePulse™ allowed us to take a
glimpse at the inner workings of each
catalog
 Findings confirmed that extra data and
load times were from 2.0/NextGen
content
 Missing
favicon (item 4)
 0.9172 seconds “uninterrupted” per
Nielsen
 14 items, for a total of 84.64 K:
• 9 GIFs
• 2 CSS
• 1 JavaScript
 Good
performance, but an interface that
only a librarian could love
 Reference
& Instruction librarians’
observations corroborated
 10.3615 seconds
 31 items, for a total of 633.09 K, to load:
• 10 CSS files
• 10 JavaScript files
• 8 GIFs/PNGs
 No
single NextGen feature slowed down
load time, but multitude of files created
unacceptable delay
 Overall, second
fastest of all five catalogs
tested
 1.2900 seconds
 Only six items and 19.27 K to load:
• 2 CSS files
• 3 GIFs
 Like
Skyline, fast, but has that “legacy
look”
 Added NextGen features:
• Cover art
• LibraryThing’s Catalog Enhancement
 Supports recommendations, tag browsing, alternate
editions/translations
 2.4674 seconds: user experience
interrupted
 19 items, 138.84 K
 Cover art nearly doubles response time
• Item 14: script on ILS that queries Amazon for art
 Slowest
among traditional catalogs;
Sirsi/Dynix takes longer to make initial
connection (Item 1 on graph)
 8.7295 seconds (though average was 4.1085
seconds)
 16 items, 148.47 K
 While attractive and well-integrated,
Syndetic Solutions content (cover art,
summary, author biography, and table of
contents) adds 1.2 seconds to load time
“The new database seems based on
Amazon.com. I don’t need suggestions, and poor
ones at that, of related books when I use the
library. I don’t need to see what other borrowers
thought of the book. The information I need is
poorly displayed. It is hard to cut and paste. It
takes several screens to scan through, instead of
the much quicker scroll in the traditional
format…. It supplies distracting, if not useless
information (a picture of the cover, the distance
to other libraries—as if I need to know how far
Provo is).”
-Auraria Campus Faculty Member
 Make
performance testing part of
evaluation process for vendor products
 Adhere to industry standards for
acceptable response times when testing
 Optimize delivery of 2.0/NextGen
features as much as possible
 Conduct user testing to ensure that the
content is “worth the wait” to their minds
Nina McHale
@ninermac
milehighbrarian.net