Gold Dust is a proposal for a project to investigate and develop innovatory solutions to the problem of information overload within the academic environment.

Gold Dust

Overview

Gold Dust will build upon some by-products of the JISC Users & Innovation funded ticTOCs project, plus the work of several other projects and research, in order 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, ultimately 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.

Aims and objectives

Gold Dust aims to develop potential solutions to deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right people, in the right way. We aim to find practical solutions to identify highly relevant items of interest from amongst a mass of current awareness information and then delivering it as required, to academics without requiring their input in the process.

The objective is to produce and test the delivery of highly relevant, personalised current awareness content to academics, from within various presentation services. As well as offering convenience for users, this will potentially improve the existing underlying information infrastructure.

Project methodology

The project will work with a selection of subject-based services and presentation services to investigate the flexible delivery of personalised content within existing presentation services. Some of these services generate content of their own via RSS feeds which will be included in the Gold Dust databases, and the project will investigate ways of enabling such ‘home’ content which matches with Personal Interest Profiles (PIPs) to be given top ranking in results delivery. Presentation services partnering Gold Dust include: the University of Hull institutional portal, Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), Intute SET, Feedforward, Aerade and Cambridge Information Group (via ProQuest).

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

The main outputs will be an open source prototype, and full-scale demonstrator, which will demonstrate the flexible delivery of highly personalised current awareness information on a regular basis. Other deliverables will include a specification for PIPs and databases of aggregated feed content of different types.

The project will improve the quality of users’ interactions with e-systems and benefit the JISC user community by investigating and developing innovative ways to facilitate the discovery and delivery of new, highly relevant resources (including content from JISC services and projects) with ease, with potential benefits for all academics in Higher and Further Education.

Technology / Standards used

Name of standard or specification

Version

RSS

1.0, 2.0

ATOM

1.0

OPML

1.0

SRU

1.2

 

Lead Institution

Project partners

Project Staff

Project Manager

Project Team

Documents & Multimedia

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Summary
Start date
2 January 2008
End date
31 March 2009
Funding programme
Users & Innovation: Personalising Technologies
Project website
Committees
  • JISC Integrated Information Environment committee
Topic