Pilot Service Enhancements

M.Moffat (M.Moffat@hw.ac.uk) 11/05/07

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Introduction
Agreed Enhancements
Discounted Enhancements

1. Introduction

An initial version of the PerX Pilot subject-based cross-repository search tool was made available during March 2006. Following a web based questionnaire and series of focus groups a list of possible pilot enhancements was compiled. These possible enhancements were discussed by the Perx project team and rated according to the development effort required and perceived benefit to end users. As a result a number of enhancements to the service were agreed to be undertaken for the enhanced pilot. The majority of agreed enhancements were introduced in during Jan-April 2007 - the project officially ends May 2007.

A number of other enhancements were discounted at the present stage as bring unviable within the project timescales/resources or as being of a lower priority.

2. Agreed Enhancements

Agreed Enhancements	Implemented?
1. Additional Content A range of additional sources were successfully added to enhanced cross search including: Copac (via SRU), Emerald Engineering, Google, GRADE, Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) Virtual Library, Open Video Project, Oxford Journals, The Structural Engineer Archive. A range of other sources were investigate but for various reasons could not be successfully included (e.g. National Archive of Geological Photographs, OSTI, Public STINET, Information Bridge)	Yes
2. Full Text Availability Indicators To help provide an indication of the likely availability of resources, all collections cross-searched by the pilot were given Full Text Availability Indicators. These indicators use a ‘traffic light' metaphor to attempt to categorise the resource availability of included collections.	Yes [details]
3. SRU Functionality Established SRU (Search/Retrieve via URL) is a search protocol for querying databases over the internet and returning search results. SRW (Search/Retrieve Web Service is a closely related protocol. PerX has implemented both a SRU/W client and a SRU server. The *PerX SRU/W client* allows SRU/W targets to be incorporated into the cross search service. Targets currently cross searched via SRU/W include COPAC and Inderscience. The PerX SRU Server allows other services to conduct SRU searches on any of collections cross searched via PerX [details].	Yes
4. Improved Advanced Search The advanced search was improved to provide a category list of collections as well as the default alphabetical list. The look and feed was modified to make the advanced search more similar to Google.	Yes
5. Default Search modified to 'ALL' As suggested by end users the default PerX search was modified to search 'All' resources rather than forcing users to choose a particular 'category' of resource to search.	Yes
6. Remove Collections with Zero hits from Results As suggested by end users databases returning zero hits were removed from the results list.	Yes
7. Refine Search Offer means for refining original search results.	No
8. Records Selection Add functionality to enable users to save search results in formats suitable for reuse.	No
9. Support Google Type Syntax	No

3. Discounted Enhancements

A number of possible enhancements were investigated via the PerX focus groups. The ideas which were not taken forward included the following:

Discounted Enhancements

a. Merging Sets
While the merging of results sets from databases and relevance ranking of these merged sets would be a very useful enhancement to the service, in the context of PerX this would be very difficult to implement. For this reason this enhancement was deemed to not to be viable within the project resources and timescales.

b. Citation Linking
Probably not possible for PerX with current metadata restraints.

c. Saved Searches
moderate interest expressed via focus groups, high development effort required.

d. Visualisation of Search Results
Little interest expressed via focus groups

e. Geospatial Searching
Little interest expressed via focus groups

f. Support Spell Check Facilities
Little interest expressed via focus groups

g. Language Translation
Little interest expressed via focus groups

Pilot Engineering Repository Xsearch

Pilot Service Enhancements

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Agreed Enhancements

3. Discounted Enhancements