Development of the British Library's OPAC 97: the value of a user-centred approach.

This article reviews the development of the British Library's OPAC services leading up to the launch of OPAC 97, offering access to nine million bibliographic records. The article attempts to show the value of a user-centred approach in the project management involved in developing such a service as recommended by Human Computer Interaction (HCI) studies. Evaluation studies of the Online Catalogue, the Network OPAC, a web prototype interface and of OPAC 97 are reviewed briefly and the results discussed in relation to the OPAC 97 project. Although the OPAC 97 interface made use of various HCI recommendations, user feedback sometimes contradicted these in specific instances, revealing the value of detailed user evaluation in developing services. room with its own catalogue only available for consultation in that one reading room in London. The British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books with bibliographic records for acquisitions up to 1975 was converted from catalogue slips and published in printed form which could now be available for use by other libraries more easily, but this did not assist users who wished to make subject enquiries. Blaise, the Library's priced online information retrieval service, was available from 1975 but this was developed for information professionals, offering bulk catalogue record downloading and bibliographic checking. Any reference enquiries had to be carried out by trained library staff on behalf of users. What the Library has attempted to do from 1993 is to offer the Library users themselves access to the collections, especially remote users who cannot visit the reading rooms each day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]