DICE Project Final Report Resource Discovery Tools Evaluation and ...

DICE Final Report
• Metadata returned must include sufficient detail (abstract / description) to assess the value of
a citation. Web links / electronic (accessible) resources preferred
• Searching considered to be slow (compared with Google). It is unclear at times whether the
tools were still working.
• There is no ranking of results
• Other desirable features relate to better navigation, history lists, clipboards, and spell-checking
The evaluation indicates that more work is required on D+ before it could be seriously considered
as an alternative to other RD services. It should not be difficult to make certain enhancements:
better error handling, selection of useful results, adding help files, better saving and configuration
to exclude troublesome targets should be possible without inordinate development time. Some
other of the requested features would likely be out of scope without rather more effort but it is hard
to judge e.g. without being properly familiar with the protocols that would be required for advanced
searching; a truly federated search service would require (at least) redesigning the interface for
the results returned to be collated and presented (cf. GetRef). Though necessary for the project
the comparison of D+ with other tools and services may not have been a fair one, considering
those other tools and services have been substantially better resourced in development. On the
wider point though, the findings are quite encouraging in supporting the case for embedding RD
tools in VLEs and learning portals.
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