Gold Dust
Status: Completed March 2009.
Background
Gold Dust is a project intending to investigate and develop innovatory solutions to the problem of information overload within the academic environment.
Gold Dust will build upon some by-products of the JISC Users & Innovation funded ticTOCs project. This is in response to analyses of various reports, user requirements and the outcomes of several user engagement activities across a series of JISC programmes and related initiatives. Gold Dust aims to produce and test a prototype and consequently a demonstrator for the delivery of highly relevant personalised current awareness content of a variety of kinds to academics. This should ultimately be possible without the need for any input by those academics in the personalisation process. It will test the delivery of this content from within selected JISC and non-JISC presentation services (i.e. flexible distribution of matching content), including a university institutional setting, a desktop tool, and selected web-based services including a commercial publishing service.
The project will develop Personal Interest Profiles (PIPs) from existing data. It will exploit the potential of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and will aggregate content from numerous sources. It will then incorporate text mining techniques and terminological searching aids in a filtering process between the PIPs and the aggregated content. It will use the complex information landscape subject area of engineering as its test-bed, and a controlled group of fifty academic testers as its main user community, with additional engagement with the U&I Community.
My Role
My duties for the Gold Dust project include:
- Project support
- Background research
- Assisiting in specifying functional requirements
- Identification of feeds
- Advocacy Work
Publications
- Rogers LJ, Hodson S, MacLeod R (2009) Transforming Current Awareness Through RSS: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the information landscape for the 21st century researcher
Presented at -
European Library Automation Conference (ELAG) 2009 "New Tools of the Trade"
- TRANSFORMING CURRENT AWARENESS THROUGH RSS: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the information landscape for the 21st Century Researcher
- Advanced Uses of RSS Feeds and a look at the Future
Presented at -
RSS, Blogging and Podcasting - The Future of Current Awareness
A workshop for publishers and information producers in the social services
31st October 2008 at Glasgow Caledonian University