The CREE Project
** December 2006: The CREE Project has received additional
funding from the JISC for a further 18 month investigation into the
presentation of Information Environment services within a portal
environment.
A copy of the CREE and CREE Extension proposals plus
additional project documentation is available from the Documents page. Deliverables, Presentations and Publications are available
for the original CREE project and will be added to during the
period of the CREE Extension. For further information
regarding CREE, please bookmark this site or contact Chris Awre,
Project Manager, via email at c.awre@hull.ac.uk.
Three main issues arose from the original CREE
investigations:
- In order to test the capability of presenting search tools in
an institutional portal environment, a proof of concept approach
was developed following, for the most part, Google style simple
search box interfaces. Whilst there is value in this as many
native web interfaces on search tools are discovering there is also
value in highlighting the more advanced search capabilities that
many search tools can offer, and allowing the user to select their
preferences. The CREE Extension Project will seek to
investigate how such advanced search capabilities can be presented
and what impact this has on the usefulness of the search tool in
general.
- One of the benefits of using an embedded search tool within a
portal framework using JSR 168 is that the search results also
appear within the portal, and the user is not taken out of the
portal into the native interface (as occurs for the most part when
embedding search tools in other web environments). However,
this raises issues about the best way to display the results within
the portal. The CREE Extension Project will investigate the
best ways to display search results in a portlet so as to make them
as usable as possible. This will include examining the return
of results as RSS feeds that can be flexibly adapted for display –
the OpenSearch API provides such capability - and extending the
XSLT work of the original CREE project to provide flexible
options.
- One of the key issues arising from presenting search tools
within an institutional portal was the focus on search and
discovery. Presenting search in this way led to users feeling
frustrated that they could not go further and felt the search led
them to a dead end. It is important not to let search
dominate considerations of other steps in the Discovery 2 Delivery
chain, which are of equal or possibly greater importance to
information retrieval. The CREE Extension Project will
examine ways in which location, requesting and delivery might be
enabled from within a portal, addressing in particular how the
OpenURL standard can be used to enable this.
The aim of the CREE Extension Project is to investigate these
three issues. This work will also take into account the
following broad considerations of how a portal could and/or should
be used:
- When presenting any service or application within a portal
framework there is a need to identify whether the whole service can
be presented within the portal, or at which point it is preferable
to pass the user out of the portal to native web interface for
ongoing interaction. Where this hand off point lies can vary,
and the need to identify it better in the context of presenting
library search services will underpin technical planning and
development
- One further issue that emerged from the CREE project from users
was understanding the pros and cons of presenting search tools in a
portal as compared to through their native interfaces. The
user feedback was in the context of a test demonstrator of
functionally limited search tools, but this question (the business
case) requires further attention. This consideration will be
built into developments within this extension project.
The original Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE)
was a project arising from the Joint Information Systems Committee
Portals: Investigations into User Requirements
Invitation to Tender in October 2003.
CREE aims to:
- Assess, test and document user requirements for Internet-based
search tools both through their native interfaces and embedded
within portal and non-portal environments in a broad range of user
contexts: this will include aspects of JISC portal functionality
and examine the user requirements for integration. The results of
these assessments will be disseminated effectively to the Higher
and Further Education community.
- Investigate and document generic aspects of adapting a range of
existing search tools and toolkits (JAFER toolkit, GetRef, GetCopy, HEIRPORT, and
Google
APIs) for presentation using the WSRP
and
JSR 168 portlet standards, facilitating their integration with
any conformant national or institutional portal. The results of
this activity will be disseminated effectively to both the HE/FE
community and relevant standards bodies.
- Investigate in detail, test and document the practical
integration of these tools with reference portal implementations.
Testing will be carried out technically and also with a broad range
of users, evaluating the effectiveness of different modes of
searching using combinations of embedded and dedicated interfaces
and complementing the user requirements activity described above.
CREE will actively seek other national and institutional portal
reference implementations with which to test software
components.