Testing, testing ...

It's a month since the launch of the Resource Discovery Forum and a good time to summarise what we've been up to.  After an introduction and welcome by Tracey Clarke, the Library's Head of Collections & eStrategy, the first session of the Forum involved a presentation and demo by project group members to give us an overview of the new catalogue/resource discovery layer and to highlight the key functionality.  Some of the initial testing plans were also outlined and Forum members have been busy with these for the past few weeks.

The idea is that Forum members will carry out 'themed' testing - that is, performing themed searches on the records already uploaded in order to detect any problem areas for further investigation.  Jeremy Grayson, the Library Database Manager, comes up with weekly tasks for Forum members to try out.  These have included testing the basic search functionality across all collections and feeding back initial impressions, testing pre-search filters, advanced search options and facets (for post-search filtering), examining how individual records display and what they contain, and checking if different versions of the same thing are grouped together in one search result (the jargon for this concept is FRBRization - pronounced 'fir-burr-eye-zation', if that helps!).  The systems team and metadata specialists are continually working on issues as they arise and when Ex Libris visited this week to deliver back of house systems training, there was a further opportunity to raise many of the issues identified during testing.  There are now over half a million records uploaded to the system and changes are taking place on an almost daily basis.