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

DICE Final Report
EDTECH2: A lot of book references returned don't have enough information to work out what to follow
through and what not. I don't find a list of keywords very useful in themselves, perhaps an abstract
would help.
EDTECH3:
EDTECH4: I compared the results of searches between the D+ target for RDN, and the RDN site itself,
and got different results. As an example if I searched for ‘hair’ the RDN top 10 site results were all to
do with human hair or the hair and beauty industry, whereas the D+ top 10 results had no relevant
references at all – instead they included diverse results such as ‘rhubarb, rabbits, and the Africana
digitisation project’. Similar differences occurred when searching for ‘skin’, ‘nails’. I also did a
comparison between DEVIL searches with the Google target, and a search using the Google search
engine. These results were again different and, at the moment, mean that I would rather use the
targets directly than via a resource discovery tool.
I conducted several searches using Intralibrary always got 0 results. I assume that this is the JORUM
repository? – If so should there be some authentication?
MAN3: The results were clearly scholarly, this being one of the main advantages of this type of
resource discovery. The main issue was the small amount of results. I was researching using ‘jazz’,
‘jazz fusion’ and ‘John Coltrane’. I got a reasonable results set using the very general term ‘jazz’ and
got some interesting results but this is clearly a very broad and not so useful term in most cases.
However, a search on ‘John Coltrane’ didn’t bring that many results. It was useful however for checking
the books available in libraries on this subject.
ACADEM3: By quality I take it to mean the depth or accuracy of the returned resources. Most searches
returned an acceptable range of results although not always as expected. For example, a search for
the word 'Anzac' in the London School or Economics returned 6 results one of which contained the
words 'story of Anzacs'. A subsequent search on 'Anzac' and 'story' offered zero results from the same
location. At the time a search for 'learning object development tools' from the Oxford site caused the
site to freeze. Perhaps unfairly the same search performed on Google scholar returned 191,000 results
in about 1 second whereas the total number of returns on this term from all sites was 15 - with
considerable waiting time. (Of course, as I said, this may be an unfair comparison although I know
where I would search first given limited time.
STU5: I still found Google gave me better quality results in terms of the level I need.
7. **Do you have comments observations to make on embedding such services within your VLE
or portal?
MAN1: Would like to have such services installed in addition to the usual search engines as specific
building blocks in the Blackboard environment.
MAN2: Embedding such services in these environments appears to be a very worthwhile task; so long
as it is clear what the user is getting and what they are not getting. Taking the search to where users
are helps them feel more in control and this needs to be borne in mind throughout the search process
(and what comes after this).
EDTECH1: This would be worth it if linked to local college resources and also if possible to share saved
lists
ACADEM1: Experience with services embedded within the library resource of this college indicates very
little usage by staff and almost none by students.
STU1: ?
STU2:
ACADEM2: N/A - I work in a small research centre without such exotica.
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