Gold Dust Project Project Manager Dr Simon Hodson University of Hull

Current Awareness and Information Overload How do you keep up with new resources and information? How do you select what you need from the mass of material? Are technologies available to help with these tasks? How can help academic objectives rather than complicating matters? Current awareness and information overload present parallel problems to researchers. The challenge is to stay up-to-date, to keep current, while not drowning under a flood of alerts and spending an inappropriate amount of time on manual filtering.

Gold Dust Gold Dust seeks to develop an innovative solution to the problem of information overload. It is a research project exploring ways of providing users with intelligently selected current awareness information. It will explore means of delivering highly relevant, personalised, current awareness content of a variety of kinds to academics, without the need for any direct input by those users. It will do so through the creation of Personal Interest Profiles which can be matched against other sources of information.

Gold Dust Approach 1.Takes advantage of potential of RSS feeds to provide current awareness information. 2.Data from ticTOCs user logs taken to create Personal Interest Profiles. 3.PIPs matched against a large data-base of current information contained in the RSS feeds of a large number of content providers. 4.Aims to find intelligent ways of pushing current awareness information to researchers, based on their personal interest profiles. Beyond manual filtering and serendipity!!!

Gold Dust Techniques Gold Dust is exploring a number of techniques for creating PIPs and matching them against relevant information. These include, separately and in combination: 1)Text-mining and significance attribution. 2)Word and term clustering. 3)Latent semantic vectors. 4)Faceted Classification Systems.

Gold Dust Diagram

Gold Dust Key Partners Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee: funding for innovative projects in information technology for education and research. Heriot-Watt: Roddy MacCleod, Senior Subject Librarian, editor of Internet Resources Newsletter. Bath: Prof. Chris McMahon, Director, Innovative Design and Manufacturing Research Centre NaCTeM: National Centre for Text-Mining. Cranfield: Focus of user activity.

Gold Dust Partners (12)

ticTOCs Table of Contents Current Awareness: RSS for Scholars: Project to develop a freely available current awareness service which will make it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) RSS feeds from numerous publishers in a personalisable website. It will also facilitate the export of TOC RSS feeds to feedreaders of choice. Currently houses in one place RSS feeds for nearly 10,000 journals from over 300 publishers. A one-stop TOC shop. Service:

Check List Please give your consent for us to log, store and use your ticTOCs data for project objectives. Please use ticTOCs as much as possible. Please remember: expand article, click through to full text and export to RefWorks. Gold Dust digest and online feedback exercise in roughly late November and early February.

Thankyou!!! Contact Details: Dr Simon Hodson Gold Dust Project, Brynmor Jones Library, University of Hull, Hull, HU5 3BN