The March session of the Resource Discovery Forum began with another look at the headline conclusions from February's focus group work. Rachel Mason, Metadata & eTechnologies Manager, summarised the key points, most notably the diverse requirements of our broad catalogue user community and the range of tasks they use the catalogue to carry out. Initial impressions of the look and feel were largely positive, but RDF members particularly noted the need for a strong corporate identity and branding, a clean and simple start page, a prominent search box, clear links to frequently carried out tasks, and consistency (of navigation, terminology, etc.). The Systems team are working on a new test interface, based on these ideas, and Andy Bussey, Library Systems Manager, gave a brief demonstration of it. RDF members have access to the new test interface as well as the 'out of the box' interface, so they can test and compare at their leisure and report back to the project team.
Next, RDF members turned their attention to the main business of the meeting, which was to consider how we should make the resource discovery layer available to customers. Star is available via the Library's web pages as well as via dedicated terminals and kiosks around campus. The new resource discovery layer should present many more possibilities. The search box can be embedded into third party web pages, for example, opening up options to access it from social networking tools and the websites of organisations affiliated with the University of Sheffield. RDF members came up with lots of ideas. We thought about all the places where customers can access University of Sheffield services and facilities, such as the University's portal (MUSE), online collaboration and networking tool (uSpace), virtual learning environment (MOLE), managed desktop service and mobile app (CampusM). The project team took away a long list of possible locations to investigate what is feasible and what might best benefit our customers.
