Faculty

Compared to students (see below) the faculty had fewer comments about the library and seemed more concerned with technology/ITS support issues. 

Library Spaces and Equipment

• multimedia/group work areas such as C20 rooms in Marx Library would benefit from phones for teleconferencing.  The new Marx Library spaces are nice but there are still relatively few options available for group meetings with virtual participants and there is high demand
• Remove the flat screen from the entrance to the Library. (not sure which library was meant; person is in Law)
• The computers in the library are too slow.  It takes way too long to sign on and get a usable screen, and then Orbis is a little slow too.

Electronic Resource Access

• Getting access to journal articles is still a pain: there are hundreds of different databases that don't talk to each other and searching for the right article often takes longer than it should. 
• Please add more journals to the e Journals, and let their access be NetID dependent, not VPN dependent. Makes it very hard to access information off campus.
• A library proxy for accessing materials without VPN.
• I regret that the libraries move stuff off campus, as browsing in the library is important. / Some journals are not available at all (SPE- Society of Petroleum Engineering). / 
• Sometimes, I can't access Nature PDF's from home, even with my VPN running.
• The online journals need to have an easier portal for remote access.

E-Books and E-Journals

• I am not sure of the difference between digitized material and electronic publications such as journal articles. I also don't know if there is a distinction between library research, and conducting research through library journals articles through Web of Knowledge. So, I don't know if I answered the survey questions as intended. Baslically, having access to Web of Knowledge and the associated electronic access to journal articles is essential for me. For the most part, I don't use other library services. I am extremely grateful for computer and pdf access to journal articles so that I don't have to physically visit Yale libraries.
• Library resources are excellent. 
• 90% or more my interactions with the Library are seamless, probably because of the integration of PubMed access with Yale accessible e-journals. Book access is not quite as good, though the major medical textbooks seem to work fine as e-books.
• The library needs to add ProQuest Religion to its on-line journal search for my work.
• More e-books
• I haven't used yales  e-library for pleasure reading on my ereader.  But I am looking forward to using this service when time presents itself

Orbis

• dont understand why some films can be found via ORBIS and not others. It's maddening. Also, the search function on the Film Center website is hard to find and not very accurate. It seems obivous to me that all materials should be available for search via ORBIS. If that's not possible, the fil study center website needs to be overhauled.
• The revised Orbis presents many problems for me to find journal articles rapidly, whereas I had few problems before. The location of printed materials is also slower given my skills. Difficult to locate what data bases are available and how to access them.
• I think the Orbis search can be more robust and intuitive.  Information should be more discoverable.  
• Orbis search doesn't understand journal title abbreviations, and in some cases I don't know what the abbreviations mean. Finding a paper in an e-Journal is often a lengthy process.
• There are times where I know that an article exists but it does not come up on searches on Ovid/Medline (using the author or the title).
• When searching for Online Journals, the Contains option is most valuable. I wish Orbis had similar functionality.
• Orbis is terrible. Intuitive = Google. Counter-intuitive = Orbis

Search and Navigation Other Than Orbis

• Is there a central place to search for all digitized content? One such site was pointed out to me, but a search revealed that that site was only pulling in some of the data that was readily available on other Yale digital archives search sites.
• University Library databases are difficult to navigate due to both functionality and design/user interface issues.
• Library online services: / Multiple pop up windows are a nuissance and cost unnecessarily time. / E.g. when finding an article in Scopus of WoS when you follow "Yale links" you always get a (irrelevant) lst of potential links instead being directly directed to the article you want. I do not want to know on how many Yale subscriptions an article is covered, I just want to access it. / Also when article is NOT available online, one is still forced through teh same menu only to find out that an article is not available electronically. / The link menues should be streamlined, so as to save access time.
• Yale database searching is incredibly sub-par. Even to FIND a database, the search mechanisms are not adequate. Also, it would be great if when searching in orbis, the databases came up. There are too many disparate locations in which you have to search. The Beinecke website search functions for the digital images collections is still not completely functional. 
• I tend to prefer to use Google scholar as a means for searching university libraries.
• I find the Yale site far less user-friendly and helpful than other university's library sites.

• I miss the old library home-page!

Services

• I have been extremely impressed with the library's use of technology. In particular, the ability to request the scan of a chapter of a book is my new favorite feature at the library.
• Iterlibrary loan Services retains a cumbersome dependence on delivering books and papers. It is important that this group gets merged into the trend within the library for electronic copies rather than paper.
• This is for the Medical Library: Please read the request comments in the Library service request before fulfill the request and reply email messages sent to docdel@pantheon.yale.edu instead of ignoring them.
• The library communication about a problem with access to electronic journals was rapidly diagnosed and solved. Kudos to them.
• Former "Ask a Librarian" was easier to use. Students and I need easy access to references
• Thanks University Library provide excellent service to us!
• (add) Chat help line, if there already isn't one.
• ITS and the Library services are the most critical services at the University. Our research and clinical enterprise depend on the expertise and availability of the ITS and Library staff and if anything, we would like the ITS availability be increased to weekends and later in the evening.  
• I ofter recall books, and somtimes I get the email saying the book is in, then go to the library and it isn't in yet.  It would seem easy enough to program the system so that the email only comes after the book is actually there.

Support for Data and Data Archiving

• archiving for the data underlying research publications
• Yale should provide long-term, archival backup for research data. Many funding agencies require such archival, but right now PIs have to do this themselves. Given how high our indirect cost rate is, Yale should be taking responsibility for this.

Students

Most common words: variations on printer, printers and printing. Many of those comments were not specifically targeted at the library, but sometimes libraries were included in what seemed to be general dissatisfaction with the cost and quality of printing. Other comments targeted at the library follow:

E-Books and E-Journals

• The library e-book reader interface is hard to use and self-defeating. 
• I used to have trouble reading Yale E-books on my mac, but this has improved this school year.
• Library e-books are sometimes buggy (half a page doesn't show up; won't let you zoom in); 
• I love the e-books feature through the library. Being able to look at a book in its entirety on my computer without having to physically go to the library is so useful. But there's a two-week limit on the download of the book, and I find this way too short. A few months would be so much better. In addition, it'd be great if I could copy and paste passages into a paper to make quoting easier, but there's no way to do this from the e-book. 
• Library e-book collection should be greatly expanded.
• Library e-books are hit and miss. Many don't even allow you to highlight or make comments, let alone print, making them essentially useless. And then the library won't order the book for you because it's available online. Leaving you to either buy the book yourself or make due with a sub-par online version. Very, very dissatisfied. 
• ebooks need to be easier to navigate. The system of turning pages, highlighting, any editing is so annoying
• Not all of the ebooks from the library are bad (OUP books, which just open as text in a browser, are great) but the ebrary software is very frustrating to use (time delays on clicking to the next page, specialist software required to download, the book takes up only about a quarter of my screen and I still need to scroll down each page)
• Please obtain more e-books so that books can be accessed online especially when the hard copy is unavailable (e.g. checked out, missing, etc.).
• The availability of books in digital form could be improved drastically.
• Very satisfied overall, one note: I hate the formatting of the Yale library e-books. Can it eventually be made more Kindle/Nook-like?
• I love how many journals and e-books are available electronically. I use this information all the time.
• Med library online resources are amazing!
• Would like for more journals to be available digitally. 
• There are many good journals that are not available through Yale Library E-Journals (from an anthropology student)
• Yeah, JSTOR should be public, and you should therefore be able to print off infinite copies of things. Not that we can do anything about them, but..
• When I have to write a reseach paper and need access to newspaper articles I can use the online databases through the library website. It's really great to have access to all that information.
• I hope that the library can improve e-book service. In the current setting, it is not convenient to read. 

Orbis

• Orbis search suggestions/corrections are horrible and ignore all basic tenets of such algorithms. 
• Orbis does not contain support for cyrillics/other alphabets, and transliterations are not applied consistently, making certain books impossible to find. / 
• I wish that ORBIS was better at helping to narrow hits. 
• The advance search option in Orbis could be made more user friendly. For example, when I am searching for a keyword in English, but Orbis automatically translates the keyword into other languages and all the hits from different language sources are shown in my search result. I then have to go to advance search to narrow down the language. Either the default should be such that the results are only in the searched language or the language filter should be easily accessible. 
• I don't like that you have to have the exact, exact, exact title for Orbis to recognize what you are saying.
• Orbis is difficult to use. 
• The Orbis catalog is AWFUL for searching. 
• The Orbis catalog is somewhat inefficient in that there seems to be no way to search quickly through a long list of results while flagging certain books so that you can return to them at a later time.
• The Orbis search is terrible - it doesn't recognize titles easily at all. Could this be made more like a Google search?
• My major quibble with Orbis is that its search function is a tad tetchy; you have to enter a correct phrase in order for the search to be successful. 
• Orbis is horrible. It's almost impossible to find anything, even when the entire title is entered (the source will often show up on the second page or something). We had a library presentation for a course and even the librarian had trouble showing us "tricks" because they didn't work. Please fix it - as a graduate student, it's really frustrating to have such a horrible system for finding sources.
• Yale University Library should be ashamed of Orbis. It is by far the worst university library search engine in the world and should be abolished.
• The Library Orbis catalog randomly (it seems) produces errors on my Mac in both Safari and Firefox. This can be very aggravating when I am attempting to navigate through hundreds of records! The errors necessitate close the browser window and starting over again. This happens very frequently when using Orbis intensively.

Search and Navigation Other Than Orbis

• lib sometimes can't access certain gated journals directly and having to use the library's search system is PAINFUL....basically no one has ever implemented a good DB search; if i know anything about the article google scholar finds it, and 95% of the time i can just click through to it; when i can't, i spend about as long tracking down the 5% through some dumb system as i do on the other 95% clicking through google scholar to the publishers web page and being auth'd through vpn or something.
• The online database search (where you search Jstor/other databases at once) is hard to use in that once all your research is selected, it's impossible/extremely difficult to sort it in folders etc.
• The organization and searchability could be improved for many of Yale's digital visual resources such as the museum paintings and other images.
• The manuscripts in the Beinecke need to be better searchable. It is very hard to find things sometimes
• I would like to see better navigation tools for the library's website. The VPN to access much of the Library content tends to be faulty and disruptive.

Scanning and Other Equipment

Scanners

• I wish there were more self-service scanners in all the libraries to scan portions of books and articles without actually checking them out (this saves both time and paper) and 2) I wish printing were cheaper (I know this is probably not something that can be fixed, but the fact of the matter remains grad students still need to do a lot of printing, and it gets really expensive sometimes) and 3) I wish ITS could somehow offer discounted licenses for (or free downloads of) Adobe software (i.e. the full versions of Photoshop and Acrobat Pro). If we are to avoid printing, for example, we need these tools to make mark-ups on (and fully edit/manipulate) PDFs and to work with images. 
• I am very dissatisfied with the microform & microfilm room in the basement of Sterling. The computers and scanning machines are unreliable and outdated. About 50% of the time that I use the machines to scan newspaper articles on microfilm, I have a problem because the computer or machine has an error. Usually the workers there don't seem to know how to help. These problems often cause delays of at least 30 minutes. This is very frustrating, since it's already so time-consuming to use the microfilm. I wish that more foreign newspapers (specifically on Latin America) were digitized and searchable. This would save me SO MUCH time on my research.
• There used to be a large V-shaped book scanner in the Sterling nave that I found to be very useful, but it disappeared after President Levin's party and has not reappeared. 
• I LOVE having book scanners at Sterling Library, but they are VERY VERY slow. After you scan in a small number of low-resolution pages, it can take TEN MINUTES for it to finally load the file onto your flash drive (or onto your e-mail address). It is infuriating, especially when there's a line of people waiting to use the scanner, and you have to sit there doing nothing for 10 minutes, with everyone glaring at you.
• More scanners - there's usually only one and someone's usually parked in the only computer that has a scanner, so I have to ask them if they could move. 
• More scanners please! 
• The scanner in the music library has a tendency to freeze up; not sure what the problem is, but it's been that way all year.
• The scanners are frequently not working, and what on earth happened to the scanners in Sterling? 
• On a whole, I'm quite satisfied with the level/quality of technology services here. I don't use all of them all the time, but I know that when I need to do high quality scanning I can go to Haas,

Printing

• Printing services are frequently down. (refering to library)
• The printers in the Yale Divinity Library are broken or out of service far far too often.
• Not sure if this comment belongs here, but it would be nice if there was a color printer in the medical library that could print larger than 8 x 11. 
• Printing, especially color printing, is prohibitively expensive. Please explore the possibility of adding low-cost color printing to the medical library technology services.
• Also, the printers in Bass usually do work, but they are still somewhat regularly out of commission. Also, there used to be three usable printers in bass: bass1 and bass2, and then the color printer. Now it does not seem possible to use the Bass2 printer, so when bass1 is broken, I often have to use the bass color printer and that costs a lot more per page. 
• I wish there were more printing and scanning options in the libraries (and that they were more up to date, especially with regards to the printing system).
• I also appreciate that hardware like scanners and color printers are available.
• I just wish so many printers weren't broken all the time. Also, there are a few printers (like one in LORIA and one in the KBT library) that just don't recognize something when you send it via laptop instead of cluster computer
• I would appreciate it if there were more printers available in Sterling Library or in the Music Library. The printers are often out of commission because they run out of toner, or there's a paper jam, etc. and these problems are not typically attended to very promptly.
• I'd like to be able to print in Marx Library just as I can in Sage and Kroon. Can't print free in Marx Library because it requires money on your card. This is very inconvenient.
• Printers are too often broken or unavailable. Sterling Library, in particular should have multiple printers in case one breaks down. 
• Printing: Sometimes if there are problems with printing, one has no idea who to go with problems. The people in the library are often not capable of expediently addressing the issue. 
• Also, more printers wd. be nice at different places in the div school. The one within the div library is so far inside the library.
• There needs to be more than One printer in the Divinity Library, and the staff should know how to maintain it. This is a big problem for us. Also, you should be able to print wirelessly via iPad or tablet.
• Yale arts library ... printers never work, the computers are awful
• YDS should have more than one printer that is accessible to students when the library is closed. And since there is only one printer currently available, maintenance on the machine needs to be more regular so that there are not days when several students are unable to print necessary items for early morning classes.
• Printing, especially color printing, is prohibitively expensive. Please explore the possibility of adding low-cost color printing to the medical library technology services.
• The new printers in the med library are slow (they take breaks between each page).  Takes forever to print out long print jobs

Equipment

• There should be longer cords to connect computers to TVs in the Bass Library study rooms

Bass Media checkout

• Even more Bass Media equipment would be good, equipment that I want to borrow is often checked out.
• media checkout: i dont know about other items but only giving 2 hours to headphones is ridiculous, it needs to be longer. 
• The equipment available from Bass is sometimes hard to use, or it comes with a non-existant battery life.
• Get more for the Bass equipment rentals! It would be awesome to have more DSLRs, and I think bringing back the Nikon is also a good choice.
• The fine for returning Mac Adaptors late to Bass ($10/day) is quite frankly ridiculous--the library has enough that it appears to never face shortages; I would advocate changing this. That being said, the University Library & IT services are wonderful

Reservations

• It would be extremely helpful to have an online reservation service for reserving group study rooms at Sterling Medical Library and subsequent libraries.
• I feel there needs to be a single place (like Banner at other colleges) where all services are listed as links. As a graduate student in my second year, I had no idea that there was an online reservation system for library group study rooms, for instance. 

Software and Computers

• The availability of specialized software - particularly in the Marx Library computer lab - are incredible, and greatly appreciated. In addition, regarding Marx Library, the large dual screens are wonderful for many research and data analysis projects that are more difficult on smaller personal computers (it would be excessive for every lab to have these, but to have one lab with them is wonderful). Also, the installations of labs in 17 Hillhouse has been of immense benefit, and while they do not seem particularly subscribed right now, I utilize them frequently and am very glad to have them available.
• A library or computer lab should have OCR software available. 
• There are two (2) look-up terminals in the whole library, and all of the other computers take upward of a minute to log on to. 
• And more access to Adobe Acrobat Pro. Frequently the computers with these functionalities are full
• Computers: The computers within the div library do not have Mozilla Firefox on them, and some do not find IE very easy to use, and sometimes its functionality is impaired with respect to what website or email or whatever is needed. (The PCs often regularly report that the IE is not up-to-date.)
• The software this year has been inconsistent (especially Adobe Suite) in that it has disappeared from some computers
• Often Mac computers mess up formatting on court and journal docs, which has been disastrous for me in the past. I'd much prefer Windows in the library.
• Sterling Library Computer Lab is the best computer lab. It could have a few more computers. This is the only location on campus I write papers. It is the most essential study space for me as well.
• (In response to a question about wireless needs to be better) Bass Library, especially on the lower level. Also, sometimes have trouble connecting to wireless network from the Spanish department at 82-90 Wall St.
• (In response to a question about wireless needs to be better) If there were a way to have better service in college basements and in bass library, that would be really helpful!  
• Better search functions on the databases would be helpful, as well as more STEM software (matlab for starters) on library computers.

Policies

• The HAAS Library's check out policies are far too short for students to use the material for research and studies. The material should be digitized or the checkout period should be longer than a day and more than one book per day.
• The University Library seems to me to be spending far too much time and effort on digitization, the digital humanities, and digital databases. These things are useful... a little. It would be a much better use of time and money if we focused on acquisitions and paper books and journals. Among other things, hard-copy journals do not disappear off the shelves when we stop paying subscription fees. I also simply never use digital books. JSTOR is of ultimate importance, but other documentary databases are far overrated from my perspective. I find more interesting things for my dissertation flipping through old newspapers and paper journals than I do searching databases that don't allow me truly to browse.
• I think it would be nice to have a place in the library where food was ok to eat. 
• If it is the right place to comment, I think the bag check at Yale library is not necessary; in fact it is just an act--they hardly check it. but occasionally, some people will be asked to open all their zips of their bags. do they look more suspicious than others? then it is like an insult to this person in public.
• It would be nice if Sterling Library had longer hours on the weekends - I'm really disappointed that a major university like Yale has such limited weekend hours for its main library.
• Orbis should send reminders about due dates much closer to the actual due date (instead of several days after)

Interlibrary Loan

• ILL and getting copies of book chapters through the ILL has been essential for my PhD research. This has been the best resource Yale has helped me with throughout my whole PhD. Thank you!

Don't Know About Services

• I don't know the names of the library services that I use, which makes my answers partial.
• I think you should have to promote more some of your services I haven't never heard of in these six years at Yale.

Communication

• Library is great about initial follow-up and has purchased books I've requested in the past which I really appreciate. A few times I've submitted messages or requests and it has been dropped without telling me the result after an initial conversation. 
• I think library communication was in here, and I have had nothing but trouble.  I had a problem with a book, emailed the required party multiple times, and didn't receive a response.  Ended up with a fine.  Finally got fine removed, but it was a terrible annoyance to deal with.  Not to mention that book arrived months after I ordered it.