Creating web guides for a library portal Jackie Wickham – Intute Martin Gill – University of Leeds

Introduction Case Study – how the University of Leeds integrated Intute resources and services to create its subject guides to electronic resources.

Presentation Outline  What is Intute  Intute’s Integration services  Background to Case Study  Implemetation  Results and benefits

What is Intute  Intute is a national Internet service guiding you to useful Web resources for education and research.  It offers an online catalogue and interactive subject tutorials.  It is a free service aimed at the UK’s higher and further education sectors and is relevant to students, lecturers, researchers and teachers.  Intute was formerly known as the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).  Funded nationally by the JISC

Network of specialists Four subject groups comprise Intute:  Arts and Humanities  Health and Life Sciences  Science, Engineering and Technology  Social Sciences  Hand selected, quality assured content – Best of the Web

The big headache!  Too many resources on Net  Keeping up to date with new ones  Link checking existing content  Assuring quality of resources

How Intute can help Put Intute search box on your library Web page, eg. for Intute: Social Science resources Create your reading lists from Intute resources List latest resources added to Intute, on your library Webpage

Integrate the Intute Search Box

Search results

RSS feeds

Creating customised e-resource lists Use MyIntute to  Create your own account  Save records  Tag records with your own keywords  Export data into your web pages  Get automatic updates  Choose from Intute and add your own resources

Customised e-resource lists Links imported into blog from MyIntute using Javascript A link to a resource not in Intute but added by the user in MyIntute.

Leeds in the mid 1990’s  Pre Google  Yahoo was a directory site  Subject gateways in their infancy  Developed a ROADS database to list subject databases and websites  Broken down to a subject or even module level

2006  Server needed replacement  Software no longer supported  Database indexes full  Workload issues of maintaining links  Databases now integrated into our catalogue  Wanted to avoid flat webpages of links  Approached RDN as they were re- launching as Intute for advice

Pilot Project  To use MyIntute to embed Intute records in our website  Sample subjects: Education, Law, Engineering, Dentistry, East Asian Studies  Looked at: Workload Availability of Intute records Technical integration

Project results  Workload MyIntute very quick and easy to use  Availability of records Most subjects had few problems Searching Intute found us better websites in many cases Some issues of scope, some language issues  Technical integration Accessibility issues

Intute Search Box Records from Intute catalogue Records from Intute catalogue Intute RSS Feeds Intute RSS Feeds

Cost savings (estimated)  No server replacement (£2k)  No software purchased (£10-20k)  Minimal systems development (£10k)  No link checking, no content checking

Working with Intute  Very helpful and flexible  Accessibility issues addressed  Local resources – MyNonIntute records

2007  MyIntute rolled out to all subjects  Replaced our general website listings  ROADS server decommissioned

Questions?