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!

A Successful Demo

Yesterday we gave a demo of the ORCA Lite portlet to the Director of Information Services and the University Librarian and we are pleased to report that it was very succesful. They were extremely impressed with the work that has been done to date, and with the look and feel of the portlet. As with previous 'show and tell' sessions, the DOI deposit tab went down particularly well!

Key points raised were:

• Acknowledgement that the portlet design has been driven by user engagement, so is geared towards giving researchers and users the functionality they require.
• ORCA Lite has a nice, simple look and feel for the end user.
• The simplification of a complex set of functions is testament to the amount of work and creativity that has gone into ORCA Lite.
• The importance of getting the right senior stakeholders on board was stressed, in order to take advantage of ORCA Lite's simplicity to drive home the message of what has been achieved, and how it can benefit the research community, both inside Cardiff University and potentially the wider academic community.
• it is also important to disseminate the project outcomes and outputs to maximise the investment across the HE sector hopefully with the assistance of JISC.

In all, both were delighted with the work done and believe ORCA Lite will add great value to the university.

We on the project team are thrilled with this great feedback, but now have to buckle down and get on with getting the portlet ready for the first phase of end user testing, and also in engaging with the relevant stakeholders in order to increase impact and take-up of ORCA Lite.

Cited!

The Cardiff University Librarian has drawn our attention to a reference to the I-WIRE Project in an article by Rosemary Russell and Michael Day (of the University of Bath), entitled ' Institutional Repository Interaction with Research Users: A Review of Current Practice' in the journal New Review of Academic Librarianship (Vol 16, supp. 1, pp. 116-131). This is a special issue on dissemination models in scholarly communication, and this article focuses on the importance of institutional repository projects consulting all potential users and stakeholders, particularly researchers. Our comprehensive user requirements exercise that we blogged about previously (see entries on I-WIRE requirements from 10th, 16th and 22nd March 2010) has been referenced as good practice.

The University Librarian states that this is great recognition for the project and is an excellent endorsement of the approach adopted at Cardiff. Needless to say, this has made our week! We will be showing the ORCA Lite portlet to both the University Librarian and the Director of Information Services this week, so hope for more postive feedback to share.

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!

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!

I-WIRE Updates

Just a quick update today. MePrints, an offshoot of EPrints, has just been brought to our attention. This is something we are interested in exploring as it is a more user-friendly version of the EPrints system, and gives users details of their recent publications and number of hits. These user-centred portal features are what the I-WIRE Project is setting out to achieve, so this is of great interest to us.

In other news, we are still ploughing through the requirements captured, focusing on what is achievable within the timescale and scope of the project. We've had three analysis sessions, and have two more scheduled for this week. Our requirements report is due at the end of January, and we also have a visit from Andy McGregor, our JISC project manager, tomorrow - a very busy week for us! Andy's visit is well-timed howver as we are wrapping up our requirements phase and moving into design and development.

Requirements Capture Phase almost completed!

Happy New Year! Just a quick update of where we are with the I-WIRE Project. We have completed almost all our planned interviews with representatives from a cross-section of schools and divisions and have collated all the requirements from those interviews and the modelling sessions. Now the core project team are going to sit down and go through all these requirements to determine which are feasible within the scope of the project,  within the time-frame we have, and what will be sustainable beyond the end of the project's lifetime. Wish us luck as we have over 100 requirements to analyse and discuss!

Louise

I-WIRE User Needs Analysis and Process Design

Earlier this week I had a really productive conversation with Christine Stewart, the Lean University Programme Leader at Cardiff, about how we adopt Lean thinking as we progress the User Needs Analysis and Process Design phases of the I-WIRE Project.

Christine's team have been playing a key role in the PALET Project and could help us gain some ground on I-WIRE by adopting a similar approach to understanding current processes, the associated issues and ultimately what users need from the Repository service that the project is going to enhance. This will involve bringing academic and research authors together to help produce these models.  We can also take the opportunity to include the Research Administrators from the I-WIRE Project's partner schools to ensure we get an end-to-end view of the processes. This will not only give us a starting position to take forward into the design phase, but will also contribute to our baseline view and help inform our evaluation work.

The next steps are to identify the appropriate stakeholders to invite (we're getting there!) and get their buy in to attend a one-day workshop at a mutually convenient time, so watch this space for progress.