Naming our Primo installation

One of the preliminary discussions that we had early on in our project was what to call our Primo installation. It soon became clear that there were two distinct options. We could either try to retain some continuity or we could choose a completely new name to indicate that this is a brand new system.

As we are planning to use Primo to completely replace our Library Catalogue and eLibrary (MetaLib) interfaces we could try to retain some continuity by using a slightly amended form of these names. To this end Library Catalogue Plus and eLibrary Plus were suggested. Certainly we have seen examples of other Primo sites where the word Plus has been added to the current Library Catalogue name, so this felt like a valid possibility.

The alternative option was to think of a brand new name and after much discussion we decided on two possibilities. These were SearchLight and LOCATe. We thought SearchLight could indicate that you were shining a light onto your search in order to find information. The name LOCATe could stand for Library Online Catalogue, and of course the word locate also means find. It was agreed that if either of these names were selected we would also need a strap line which would summarise what the system does.

As we were having these discussions just before the end of term we decided to try to get some student input into which name our users preferred. In order to try to reach as many people as possible we used two methods to get feedback. Firstly, we went around the Library and asked users if they could spare a few minutes to give us their views. To those that were happy to do this we explained briefly about the plan to introduce Primo and asked them which name they liked best. Secondly, we created a SurveyMonkey poll where we again explained about Primo and asked which of the four names respondents preferred.

We received just under 150 responses, split very evenly between online and face-to-face. Unfortunately, the results weren’t completely conclusive, although there were two names that came out ahead. These were eLibrary Plus and LOCATe and both had a similar number of votes. As term was ending and there wasn’t time to do another student poll it was decided to survey the Library staff and ask them to choose between these two options. This time there was a more conclusive result and the name LOCATe was chosen.

A very useful side benefit of carrying out the user survey about the name was that we also asked for volunteers to take part in our usability testing over the summer. We knew this was likely to take place in July or August, so we asked everyone who gave us input about the name if they lived close enough to the University to come in over summer and if so whether they were interested in taking part in some testing if there was a financial incentive. As a result of this we got 40 volunteers, all of whom gave us their email addresses and said we could contact them when we were arranging the testing. This was a big relief as one of our concerns had been how we would contact users about the tests during the quiet summer period.