evaluation and evolution: more on rooms, resolver & singlesearch at leicester janet guinea...
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Evaluation and Evolution:More on Rooms, Resolver &
SingleSearch at Leicester
Janet GuineaJonathan McGowan
One Year On…
• New skins • Usability testing• Guidelines and best practice• Involvement: Library staff/University
publicity• Resolver/eLink maturity• SingleSearch in progress• Rooms pilot live in October 2005
Usability Studies
• 2 usability studies: March (main study) and August
• Academic staff, postgraduate, library staff volunteers, undergraduate, foreign students:- rewards!
• Facilitator and observer
• SingleSearch tested in August study
• Feedback throughout the pilot
Usability (March)• Overall very positive• Welcomed the use of images• Eye automatically goes to top left, so make sure most important
information is located there• Too much text• Navigation not obvious, especially from home page• Some items have positive and negative feedback e.g. predefined
searches.• Non-standard University branding • Browser/accessibility issues• Many people not aware of the subject pages in their present form!• Suggestions for further resources to include being received.
March conclusions
• satisfactory level of usability, but can be enhanced by addressing certain issues
• unfamiliarity of the interface = training and experience• greater level of consistency in our Room building
required• design of the banner and terminology may need to be
revisited• tab names should be consistent between rooms where
possible• Using SingleSearch - make the nature of the search
clear to the user• accessibility - JAWS software enables users to use the
pages. Some work required
Guidelines/best practice
• Consistency – e.g. Welcome tab + image• Tab arrangement/pane names• Alphabetical versus logical debate• Skin choice• Link text standardised• Metadata: subject/description controls - keywords• Embedding websites: permission/rules• HTML guidance • Sharing content modules
August Study
• Most people impressed by Rooms
• Generally unaware of efforts to organise content alphabetically or in any other logical sequence
• SingleSearch: Usability tasks and questions must be considered carefully
Integration
• iLink implemented August 2005• Rooms referenced on each page• Search results links to SingleSearch:
SINGLE_SEARCH_URL• Search result links via ISSN to eLink: OPEN_URL• Catalogue > GoogleScholar > eLink:
SEARCH_ENGINE_URL_PT1|http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=|
• Migration: Rooms2/EPS in summer 2006
SingleSearch – In the Beginning
• What does it do?• Who is it for?• Is SingleSearch any use in an Academic
Environment?• The potential of a configurable Metasearch
engine• The threat to librarians everywhere!!!!!!
The Plug-in Problem
• The architecture of SingleSearch• A modifiable front end supporting search modules or
‘plug-ins’• You want how many plug-ins?• Plug-ins are configured by Muse not locally• Limited configuration options• Inconsistency of changes by both MUSE and Database
providers• Authentication
The Athenian Question
• Authentication is the biggest issue• IP verification works due to resident server• Server IP for search and client IP for result
linking• Athens databases are a problem• Athens authentication is not supported• Session id cookies also present interesting
difficulties
Where we are now
• The service is live but not hugely publicised• SingleSearch does provide an exceptional resource• Much Electronic content specific to academia is available • SingleSearch does provide a metasearch service far in
advance of Mamma, Metacrawler or Dogpile• SingleSearch is no threat to subject librarians but should
be pushed as a web search starting point• Future advances overcoming authentication difficulties
and incorporating OpenURL links from the delivered results will provide a truly superb resource.