End User Testing

Last week, we began to demo our proposed portlet version of ORCA to some of our stakeholders, and the feedback has been very positive, confirming that we are aligned with our stakeholders' requirements. Outlined below are the key messages that we took from the interviews:

• All participants have said that the portlet looks very quick and easy to use, and that it would not take up excessive amounts of their time to enter minimum data.
• Researchers understand the importance of open access, and the part it can play in increasing the impact of Cardiff research
• Ease of access to publication data is key
• Being able to extract research data from the portlet to use in various reports would be a big time saver for them.
• The portlet version of ORCA would be particularly useful for reports, conference proceedings and working papers which are usually hidden away on web pages.
• A feed to web pages would be a good incentive to authors and beneficial to the academic school.
• Keywords are important to ensuring an article is targeted at the right audience, and to getting the article to the top of the search result list
• An indicator that the item has been refereed would be valuable

We are very pleased to receive such good responses! We also received good feedback from our colleagues in the INSRVeducation team yesterday. We have four more 'show and tell' sessions planned for August with more colleagues from Information Services and with some of our other academic and research administrator stakeholders in the academic schools, and are also giving a demonstration to fellow library staff on 1st September. So look out for more feedback when we get it!

OR2010 Madrid

The 5^th International Conference on Open Repositories was recently held in Madrid this year, and as part of our dissemination programme, the I-WIRE team (Scott, myself, Repository Manager Tracey and Technical Lead Jim) attended. We contributed a poster on ‘Integrating the Institutional Repository with a Portal Environment’, and Scott and Jim gave a presentation on the technical challenge of building a portlet version of the institutional repository ORCA. We were pleased with the reception of both, and the team made valuable contacts with other developers and projects. We all very much enjoyed Madrid – a beautiful city which we wished we could have explored more of (although we did make it to the Prado and to the Bernabeu stadium on the night of the World Cup semi-final!)

From Cardiff to Madrid (via Gregynog)

Things are very busy on the I-WIRE front at the moment. We finished the design stage at the end of last month, have had approval for our portlet design from our project management group, and are now in the Toolset Development phase.

Our poster proposal has been accepted for the Open Repositories Conference in Madrid next month, so Scott and I have been working very hard on our poster. (I have also been working very hard on the conference registration, but that's another story!) We had the poster printed two weeks ago and are very pleased with it. The poster, along with Scott and Tracey, has taken a detour to the annual Gregynog Colloquium this week, where Scott and Tracey presented a paper on 'Encouraging author self-deposit at Cardiff University' which was well recieved. It was due to be filmed, but because of a technical fault this didn't happen - much to Scott and Tracey's relief! Hopefully, we will recieve some useful feedback on the poster before Madrid.