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ROADS User Survey Results - May 1999 |
The following findings have been drawn from the recent ROADS User Survey and from enquiries that have come through to the team via roads-liaison email contact address. (roads-liaison@bris.ac.uk)
As a supplement to the ROADS manual we have produced 'The diary of a ROADS gateway installation'.
The document charts the installation, configuration, design and building of a ROADS based information gateway, step by step.
This was in response to the most repeatedly highlighted failing reported in the survey; namely documentation. While most respondents agreed that the current ROADS manual was exhaustive in its coverage of the functionality of the software, it is not very useful to a newbie who wants to know what steps to go through in setting up a gateway from scratch.
The current format of the manual consists of detailed specifications and descriptions of the purpose of each of the Perl scripts that make up the toolkit. As such it is very useful for an experienced ROADS user who wishes to make some change to the configuration of an existing gateway or to add new features.
For a newbie however, the only way to learn how to set up a gateway is firstly by reading the manual in-toto and then learning by a process of trial and error. This was clearly unsatisfactory.
Other requests for documentation have included those for a 'Cross-Searching How-To guide' and a 'Harvesting How-To' and one for the Z39.50 functionality. There are currently tasks assigned on our work plan to produce all of these. The diary format has proven very popular so these other guides may well be produced in a similar format.
One of the recent developments by the SOSIG team has been the implementation of a more intuitive hierarchical browsing interface, where sub-headings in the subject tree are displayed at the top of each page and where resources are sub-sorted by category.
This has required the modification of a number of ROADS script and a completely new type of class-map. Many users have expressed a desire to include this functionality in their gateways in order to make the subject listings more Yahoo-like.
Jasper Tredgold, the technical officer at SOSIG who developed these scripts has agreed to fold his work back into future versions of ROADS and at a recent project executive meeting it was agreed that a version 2.3 bundle should be released which includes these and other new developments.
It should also be possible to provide existing users with a patch which would overlay their current installation with these new features.
We have had an increasing number of enquiries about cross-searching ROADS gateways particularly from Scandinavian service providers but also from UK institutions who have multiple ROADS based services. It is our intention to produce both a 'How-To' guide and also to produce a service quality cross-searching gateway, which we will use to investigate interface issues. We also hope to get feedback from the current eLib ANR services and other ROADS users.
As a result of SOSIG unveiling their new Harvested database we have had a growing number of enquiries about this technology.
The system allows service providers to index the text of the resources which are listed in SOSIG meaning that users can either search the bibliographic descriptions of quality resources or perform free text searches on the resources themselves.
In the current funding environment, demonstrating that your gateway is actually providing the kind of service you are funded for is becoming more and more important.
Also as more gateways move beyond projects and into full blown services, service providers are turning their attention to how they might produce suitable usage statistics from their gateways, both in order to justify themselves to funders but also to ensure they are responding to user requirements.
Both SOSIG and Bized use various tools to produce usage statistics. These are still quite crude however and mostly rely on third party software which extracts information from standard Apache Web server logs.
Some ROADS tools have however been developed and again we hope to be able to feed these back into the ROADS development cycle to allow wider use.
By default ROADS search results are sorted according to their relevance to the query, ie, how many times each of the search terms appears in each retrieved template.
Many users have expressed a desire to have the option of sorting search results in other ways however. Tracy Gardner of UKOLN has produced a revised Rank.pm module which will allow more flexibility. These developments will also be rolled back into the ROADS code-base.
The ROADS Administration Centre interface was never really developed beyond the proof of concept stage. The default Admin Centre is generated dynamically from a script.
Most users find it much easier to use a static HTML page however. This allows users to have multiple interfaces. In particular users often request the option to have a separate interface for cataloguers and gateway admin staff. This enables them to remove links to any tools which only the admin staff use regularly making for a less cluttered and confusing interface.
Several people asked about how they might go about creating new ROADS template types for their gateways. This is partly due to the fact that many users would like to change the labels for fields in the Web based template editor. Because the software does not allow this, many users have changed template attributes instead. This is a grave problem since inflexibility in the design of the interface is causing gateways to break with standards which will create major problems for cross-searching and interoperability later on. (A more detailed report will appear shortly as the 'RECCI study of ROADS template use', the preliminary RECCI report is available at time of writing.)
It will be possible to change field labels without changing the underlying template attributes in the new Perl/Tk Template Editor, but not at present for the Web version. The new Perl/Tk editor will also provide a GUI for setting up new template types without having to edit a myriad of text files.
It has become clear from correspondence with a number of new users that the default interface ROADS comes with out of the box could be improved upon. Users either expect something which looks like SOSIG or Yahoo.
There is no real reason why we can't provide this and offer multiple interface styles in future bundles. There are some code issues that would need to be ironed out to provide this and perhaps we need to give users a few more configuration options / tools.
Members of the ILRT Internet Development team have designed, set up and are managing a number of ROADS based gateways and have become rather expert in designing and configuring ROADS interfaces. It is hoped that this work can be fed back into the development cycle.
Once again, one of the respondents requested that we add support for back-end databases other than the text file templates the system uses at present. This is something that came out of our user survey in May 1998. The results are available and are being acted upon. ROADS version 3 will include an API to allow the use of different back-end databases.
Due to the large number of users in Scandinavia we have had a number of requests to support the use of non-latin characters for searching and browsing. Whilst this is perfectly reasonable request and Jon and Martin have got a long way towards solving it there were a number of issues which were both beyond our remit and expertise to resolve.
We were hoping therefore that a hacker from one of the Scandinavian countries might help us. Fortunately, Lasse Haataja of Oulu University Library proposed just such a solution in January 1999. Jon has added these changes into the code-base for version 3.
We have a growing numbers of requests for details about how to develop multi-lingual gateways. ROADS has had multi-lingual support since the release of version 2. See the manual for further details.
Last updated: May 1999 - paul.hollands@bris.ac.uk