I won't be able to fully crunch the numbers until the survey closes on the 14th, but (so far) UK respondents have consistently rated the importance of each feature lower than the other major countries (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and USA), with the exception of "enriched content".

It will be interesting to speculate why this is ...are UK libraries less aware of these features? ...are they aware but they have other priorities or simply don't regard them as being important? ...are we just a bunch of cynical whiners?

Interestingly, New Zealand is almost the opposite -- very few of the respondents have implemented (or plan to implement) the "more cowbell" features, but they often give the features very high importance. In fact, the only feature that seems to be widely implemented in NZ is enriched content (86% of respondents have it).

Some of the other trends appearing in the survey are that:

1) people who have implemented a feature consistently give that feature an average importance higher than those who haven't implemented it

2) people who are planning to implement a feature nearly always rate its importance higher than those who have already implemented it

Hi Dan

I guess being based in Bristol makes you a III man?

The survey is bringing in some really useful data.

There definitely seems to be a difference between what respondents regard as being important features in a modern OPAC and what vendors are currently supplying today.

Your last sentence implies that you don't think library users (and vendors?) see these as being important features to offer in an OPAC? If so, what's "Encore" all about?