Questionnaire surveys to discover academic staff and library staff perceptions of a National Union catalogue

During the feasibility study into a National Union catalogue for the UK (UKNUC), a questionnaire survey was undertaken of the needs of both academic staff in higher education and library staff. A response rate of 40-50 per cent was achieved, 846 questionnaires being returned for academics and 724 for librarians. The analysis suggests that a UKNUC would be highly valued and heavily used by all categories. Academics felt it would have a positive effect on their information searching, and wished to include the holdings of the British Library, and libraries of both the major research universities and the `̀ traditional’’ universities. They wanted it to be comprehensive and easy to use, to include locations of both books and journals, and to facilitate subject collection searching. Library staff have similar priorities to academics, although there are more variations by sector and a recognition of a UKNUC’s value as a potential source of bibliographic records. Introduction The increased use and development of Z39.50 technology in recent years has stimulated interest in distributed searching and re-opened the arguments about the pros and cons of union catalogue creation. In particular, discussions have contrasted the ease of searching of monolithic `̀ physical’’ union catalogues and their perceived high set-up and maintenance costs with the possibilities of utilising comparatively low-cost Z39.50 distributed solutions to create `̀ virtual’’ union catalogues established at the time of search (see for example Cousins, 1999). In UK higher education (HE) both catalogue models have been supported and financed nationally, particularly through HE, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Funding Councils. The COPAC service: http:// www.copac.ac.uk ± is a physical union catalogue hosted and managed by Manchester Computing and providing a single point of access to catalogue records of the libraries of the (UK) Consortium of University Research Libraries T h e c u r r e n t is s u e a n d f u l l te x t a r c h iv e o f th is jo u r n a l i s a v a i la b le a t http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm John Duffy, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Edinburgh and Lyn Middleton, The Survey Team, University of Edinburgh were invaluable in advising on sampling frameworks and questionnaire design respectively and the work would not have been a success without them. The Survey Team provided the quantitative analysis of the responses but the responsibility for the analyses and discussion in this paper rests with the authors.