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.

Chuffed!

You may be wondering about the title of this blog, but 'chuffed' was one of the reactions we got when we gave a demonstration of our proposed portlet version of ORCA (which we are calling ORCA Lite) to the Deputy University Librarian and the Head of Technical and Operational Services for ULS, who are two of our internal stakeholders in the project. 'Bowled over' was another phrase used! Both were very impressed with the clean look and the functionality of ORCA Lite, and especially so with the ease of the DOI deposit tab.

We also gave a demo to the Head of Library Service Development, who also gave very positive feedback. She was very impressed with the work achieved so far, and particularly with the DOI deposit function (that's definitely a hit!). Two very useful suggestions she gave us were:

• would it be possible for the author to choose more than one school to be attached to the ORCA record? Interdisciplinary work and collaboration between two or more schools is of increasing importance and impact in academia. It is possible that having an 'Add Another School' button (similar to that for multiple authors) could be the answer.
• A field to indicate the funding body (if applicable) would be useful.

Overall all three internal stakeholders were very impressed with the work done so far. We are definitely heading in the right direction.

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!