The more the better! But what happened if they are scattered all over the place!

We have our summer reading program going on at the library I work for. The library purchased the software/program from Evanced to handle the online reading logs, and reviews for the program. This is not in my area and I was never involved in the decision making process. Anyway it is up and running as it is, and as far as I know we have a pretty good turn out. Lots of patrons signed up online and posted their reviews.

On the other hand, I have pushed to purchase yet another catalog review/rating engine for our library -- Chilifresh. It can be easily integrated into our online catalog and is already very popular among some public libraries. Anyway, this will be yet another place for our patrons to post reviews.

Now here comes the question. What to do with these reviews posted on our Summer Reading Program after it ends. This was asked by a staff member on our staff blog. Are we simply going to just delete them? Keep them for next summer? Add them to our online catalog? (well this person does not know that this cannot be easily done)

The person asking the question does not know about the Chilifresh project I am working on but this person asked a very good question. It is a key to think about how we offer our services.

More is better, isn't it? More services to our patrons is of course better. But what happens if they are scattered all over the place?? Does that really offer much convenience to our patrons? Log in here to leave a review in our SRP... log in there to leave a review on our catalog...

This is not user friendly at all. More is not better when you are sending patrons all over the place to do things they should be able to do in one place.

I do not have a specific solution to the issue that our staff raised. I don't think that there is a way for Chilifresh to load the reviews we got from Evanced into their database so that they will show up in our catalog. We may have to manually do this if we want to preserve the reviews our patrons wrote for the Summer Reading Program.

If only we could have thought more about these two separate but yet similar services we are offering to our patrons and planned a better way to integrate them rather than offering both but at separate places. Personally I don't like the review section on Evanced. It looks pretty ugly. There is a rating system but it does not display. On the other hand, Chilifresh has a star rating system that displays right up front. The reviews look like they are part of our catalog. We get reviews from not just our patrons but from all participating libraries.

I don't know how my boss will answer our staff. I am just frustrated that we did not do a better planning job as we should have, and I feel like we do not have the vision to offer more integrated an user-friendly services to our patrons.