SCIS Publisher Survey

 

Thank you to everyone who recently completed our SCIS Publisher Survey. We received an incredibly impressive 1,162 responses – so we now have plenty of rich data to analyse, and a lovely list of publishing house suggestions.

Below are some key themes that emerged from the results.

The SCIS hit rate

Your feedback (and our hit rate) indicates we are doing well with our coverage of ‘major’ publishing houses. Our team will continue to focus on improving our hit rate for the smaller ones. We had plenty of comments about including more American and religious texts, though pleasingly many respondents observed that the hit rate had markedly improved in the last two years. In fact, 81% of respondents estimated your hit rate to be between 81–100%. (Yay!)

When a SCIS record is missing

We asked respondents, ‘If you purchase books from a publisher and there are no matching SCIS records, what do you do next?’ Forty-seven per cent of users catalogue the titles yourself (some referring to a ‘similar’ SCIS record or other library sources to help guide you), and 32 per cent put the books aside and check a week or two later to see if SCIS records become available.

While there are few surprises in these results, interestingly, only three out of 1,162 respondents contact their local publisher/bookseller or sales rep if SCIS records are not available for their recently purchased books. And only 33 of you contact SCIS directly to let us know if a publisher’s titles are missing.

As a cataloguing community, we rely on feedback to keep our hit rate high. So if you ever have an opportunity to mention SCIS to your local bookseller, or let us know directly, everyone will benefit.

Please take a moment to look at the amazing publishers who already support us.

Where to go for help

Not everyone is aware that we have online help articles that you can find by clicking the help icon on the SCIS website.  We also have a friendly customer service team, Sarah and Helen, who can help you troubleshoot issues and streamline downloading.

We also have cataloguers (Renate and the team) across Australia and New Zealand on hand for cataloguing queries.

Please check out our website, or email help@scisdata.com with any queries you have.

Next steps for SCIS

  1. We have a lovely list of new publishing houses to contact.
  2. Any feedback about catalogue records has been passed to our quality assurance manager.
  3. We will continue to work with publishers, distributors and library staff to keep our hit rate as high as possible for as many people as possible.

And below is one of our favourite quotes from the survey feedback. It’s all anonymous so we don’t know who you are, but you made our day.

‘I love SCIS. This is the best thing that happened to my cataloguing life.’

Thank you, and happy cataloguing!

Published by

Rachel

Rachel is General Manager at Education Services Australia, loves SCIS, and has a professional interest in content curation and advocacy.

2 thoughts on “SCIS Publisher Survey”

  1. Great news for a very dedicated team of people who provide a very efficient service to library staff. Thanks heaps!

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