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

Conclusions
DICE Final Report
The project has achieved its principal outputs in evaluating the D+ toolkit and in integrating this and
other resource discovery services in COSE. A demonstrator VLE with the new RD features will be
maintained at least in the medium term and a downloadable version has being produced, albeit this
is only a beta release, as advertised through the project web site
(http://www.staffs.ac.uk/COSE/DICE). COSE source code is available on request under agreed
terms, prior to its release as open source in version 3.0.
We hope the project has been useful to toolkit developers and to the wider community. We have
demonstrated that the toolkit is easily integrated and there is value in providing RD services
embedded in VLEs. Our technical evaluation should serve to clarify certain points on the operation
of the toolkit and allow practitioners to make a realistic assessment in their expectations of it.
The project has been useful to us in that it has allowed us
• to explore developments in resource discovery in general
• to develop our VLE with resource discovery features
• benefit from a modular approach in (open source) software development
• migrate to using servlet containers and web services in conjunction with COSE
• to engage with e-learning community locally and regionally
• to learn from and share with other participants in the ELF programme
Lessons learned and further work
Of the lessons learned, we would first endorse the open source, standards and web services
approach of software development promoted in the ELF. Sustainability of open source software
projects has been recognised as an issue by JISC over a number of years, and was the subject of a
recent conference (OSSWatch, Said Business School, Oxford, April 10th – 12th). It was
encouraging at least to hear the idea mooted there of the establishment of a software foundation in
supporting open software projects. Considering the limited resources available in producing or
supporting software developed with grant funding, the open source model at least gives the
opportunity for further development effort in extending the life of an application, so far as it is
perceived to have some value.
In retrospect, we had unrealistic expectations of the toolkit and how we might use it. A web service
solution to integration was beyond us, under the circumstances, and would have incurred
substantial overheads with a database implementation. Our project proposal was too ambitious in
other aims too. We had hoped to progress work started in ICE in respect of disaggregating
resource lists, metadata-tagging and re-using lists components but this proved not possible within
the project timeline either. Much more time than expected was experience in conducting the user
evaluation, engaging with the local user groups, conducting background research and learning how
the toolkit worked. Though we deemed these things necessary, what was meant to be a six month
project has taken nine months after making allowance for a delayed start and other time lost.
There were some unexpected benefits accruing from the project. Our department was funded to
purchase the Google Mini search engine which will help in further work in re-using resource lists
and other learning objects; perhaps also in metadata and repository development. As a result of
email correspondence with Google Scholar we were informed that the terms of the license allowed
for the service to be embedded in COSE (or other VLEs). There was also interest, participation and
encouragement from certain parties which was quite gratifying.
As we have found with other projects, there are always new opportunities presented and avenues of
research to investigate. Other ELF projects of particular relevance are the MDC and Resource List
Services projects. There remain issues outstanding from DICE - authentication, integration with
SFX / Metalib / link resolver services, further integration w COSE to meet our original objectives -
and we would like to continue with the further development of D+, anticipating that licensing and
support issues will be resolved.
Note: JISC are currently conducting a Strategic Review of JISC Resource Discovery Services and
(separately) a Study Evaluating Bibliographic and Citation Databases used in the UK HE community
30