Latest News

Merry Christmas everyone!

Since our last blog in early November, we have been refining the 'ORCA Lite'* portlet, and addressing some essential technical issues regarding the 'My Publications' tab - as this was a major requirement that came out of our stakeholder engagement phase, we felt it was very important to get this right before launching the portlet for testing.

This week, however, we have started some end user testing with colleagues in Information Services, and so far the feedback has been positive. Comments include:

• 'Well done for getting this far! Overall looks great and is very easy to use.'
• 'Overall very easy to deposit, so far no issues with the process itself.'
• 'I have to say again how impressed I am with the portlet - love it!'

We are planning to involve more end user testers in January, before piloting with a few academic schools in February and March. We will keep you updated with our progress!

*We have been calling the portlet 'ORCA Lite', but are now having last-minute doubts about the name! While it is catchy, we are unsure that it fully captures the extent of the service offered - does it imply less functionality rather than offering a different but not reduced user experience? Any thoughts on this would be very welcome, so please comment!

Oh, and Happy New Year!

October update

We have been rather quiet on the blogging front of late, so here is a quick update of where we are with the I-WIRE project.

We are busy putting the finishing touches to the ORCA Lite portlet before we start end user testing with our volunteers in late November/early December. There is one major hurdle that we need to overcome before starting testing, and that is finding a way to allow researchers to indicate their selected publications (most recent, for example, or most cited) that will in turn allow them to populate web pages, appraisal documents or funding applications with this chosen data. This was one of the major requirements that came out of the Requirements Capture phase, and so it is important that we solve this. A member of the EPrints team at Southampton is coming down early next month to work with the development team on this.

Any thoughts on this are very welcome!