Improving Primo Usability and Teachability with Help from the Users

In the aftermath of a consortium migration to a shared cloud-based resource management and discovery system, a small college library implemented a web usability test to uncover the kinds of difficulties students had with the new interface. Lessons learned from this study led to targeted changes, which simplified aspects of searching, but also enhanced the librarians’ ability to teach more effectively. The authors discuss the testing methods, results, and teaching opportunities, both realized and potential, which arose from implementing changes

Semantic annotation, publication, and discovery of Java software components: an integrated approach

Component-based software development has matured into standard practice in software engineering. Among the advantages of reusing software modules are lower costs, faster development, more manageable code, increased productivity, and improved software quality. As the number of available software components has grown, so has the need for effective component search and retrieval. Traditional search approaches, such as keyword matching, have proved ineffective when applied to software components. Applying a semantically- enhanced approach to component classification, publication, and discovery can greatly increase the efficiency of searching and retrieving software components. This has been already applied in the context of Web technologies, and Web services in particular, in the frame of Semantic Web Services research. This paper examines the similarities between software components and Web services and adapts an existing Semantic Web Service publication and discovery solution into a software component annotation and discovery tool which is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in

Investigating people: a qualitative analysis of the search behaviours of open-source intelligence analysts

The Internet and the World Wide Web have become integral parts of the lives of many modern individuals, enabling almost instantaneous communication, sharing and broadcasting of thoughts, feelings and opinions. Much of this information is publicly facing, and as such, it can be utilised in a multitude of online investigations, ranging from employee vetting and credit checking to counter-terrorism and fraud prevention/detection. However, the search needs and behaviours of these investigators are not well documented in the literature. In order to address this gap, an in-depth qualitative study was carried out in cooperation with a leading investigation company. The research contribution is an initial identification of Open-Source Intelligence investigator search behaviours, the procedures and practices that they undertake, along with an overview of the difficulties and challenges that they encounter as part of their domain. This lays the foundation for future research in to the varied domain of Open-Source Intelligence gathering

What Does it Take to Make Discovery a Success?: A Survey of Discovery Tool Adoption, Instruction, and Evaluation Among Academic Libraries

Discovery tools have been widely adopted by academic libraries, yet little information exists that connects common practices regarding discovery tool implementation, maintenance, assessment, and staffing with conventions for research and instruction. The authors surveyed heads of reference and instruction departments in research and land-grant university libraries. The survey results revealed common practices with discovery tools among academic libraries. This study also draws connections between operational, instructional, and assessment practices and perceptions that participants have of the success of their discovery tool. Participants who indicated successful implementation of their discovery tool hailed from institutions that made significant commitments to the operations, maintenance, and acceptance of their discovery tool. Participants who indicated an unsuccessful implementation, or who were unsure about the success of their implementation, did not make lasting commitments to the technical maintenance, operations, and acceptance of their discovery tool

Remembering history : the work of the information services sub-committee of the Joint Information Services Committee in the UK

The paper seeks to record the work of the committee and its interaction with the much better known Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme. It also examines the principles that underlay the development of content acquisition and supporting infrastructure in UK university libraries in the 1990s

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery

SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research. Final Project Report: Elements and Future Development Requirements of a Common Information Environment for Scotland

The SPEIR (Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research) project was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). It ran from February 2003 to September 2004, slightly longer than the 18 months originally scheduled and was managed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR). With SLIC's agreement, community stakeholders were represented in the project by the Confederation of Scottish Mini-Cooperatives (CoSMiC), an organisation whose members include SLIC, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU), the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), regional cooperatives such as the Ayrshire Libraries Forum (ALF)1, and representatives from the Museums and Archives communities in Scotland. Aims; A Common Information Environment For Scotland The aims of the project were to: o Conduct basic research into the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal pilot and the public library CAIRNS integration proposal; o Develop associated pilot facilities by enhancing existing facilities or developing new ones; o Ensure that both infrastructure proposals and pilot facilities were sufficiently generic to be utilised in support of other portals developed by the Scottish information community; o Ensure the interoperability of infrastructural elements beyond Scotland through adherence to established or developing national and international standards. Since the Scottish information landscape is taken by CoSMiC members to encompass relevant activities in Archives, Libraries, Museums, and related domains, the project was, in essence, concerned with identifying, researching, and developing the elements of an internationally interoperable common information environment for Scotland, and of determining the best path for future progress