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

14. Do you have any other comments?
DICE Final Report
MAN1:
MAN2:
EDTECH1:
ACADEM1: Yes this medium has potential by needs to get away from a 20 century library style and
embrace all that is good in the world electronic games and the Internet. Let there be colour and life
included in the facility.
STU1:
STU2: The null results must be formatted in a separate way.the search time is the main criteria. I would
use D+ toolkit as a secondary tool but not as a primary tool.
ACADEM2: The topics I need to look for are likely to produce a lot of results, most of dubious
relevance, so the ability to refine a search by using phrases or several search terms, by being able to
exclude some words or phrases, or to search within results is very useful. I am usually searching for
"industrial estates", "corporate responsibility" "small businesses" "environmental impact" "economic
impact" etc. If I am limited to one word I get 10000s of results.
STU3: YES. DEVIL will be a good tool in any VLE and if the D+ should be enhanced.
STU4: ALL SAVING MUST BE IMPROVED
EDTECH2: No
EDTECH3:
EDTECH4: On several occasions during the evaluation period one or more of the tools were
unavailable. I assume that this is because they are under development; however they would need to
be reliable when available for general use. I also found that neither the D+ nor the DEVIL tools were
available to me from the college where I work. I assume this was something to do with network
configuration and restrictions but I guess this points at wider issues of access from within organisations.
Both D+ and DEVIL appeared slow in their searches. During the search there was little evidence of
activity and, because of this, it was unclear at times whether the tools was still working.
MAN3: As gets a bit predictable, it seems that there’s hefty competition from Google and Google
Scholar. The D+ tool etc. may be useful in itself but let down but the quantity of resources catalogued
and the extent of the metadata available for fine grained searching. Although structured metadata
allows highly focussed searching this is not much use if the resources simply aren’t there. There’s a
tendency to rely on things like Google and Google Scholar despite my being well aware of its
weaknesses.
ACADEM3: My experience of the site is as follows: It was fairly useful as a means of searching. The
interface is plain and it has fairly limited in features at this stage. On screen help to assist searching
was limited. It seemed slow in operation at times. It was not clear what was being searched - the title,
the content - and some searches were uneven.
STU5: The searches are really slow compared to Google especially in DEVIL, so again no point of
Google being in DEVIL.
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