Responsive vs. Native Mobile Search: A Comparative Study of Transaction Logs

Abstract

The Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (or CARLI) is comprised of 130 libraries, a majority of which participate in the union catalog I-Share for resource sharing. The consortium implemented VuFind 4, a responsive web interface, as their shared union catalog in December 2017. This study compared search transaction logs from a native mobile app that serves the consortium with search transactions in the responsive mobile browser. Library professionals in the consortium sought to understand the nature of mobile search features by evaluating the relative popularity of mobile devices used, search terms, and search facets within the two mobile search options. The significance of this research is that it provides comparative data on mobile search features to the library UX community.