JISC

Start date: 1 February 2004

End date: 31 July 2005

Funding programme: Portals programme

Project website: http://www.hull.ac.uk/esig/cree/

JISC theme(s): Information environment

The Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) is a project arising from the Joint Information Systems Committee, Portals: Investigations into User Requirements & Sustainability invitation to tender. This seeks to build an environment where the portal developments within JISC can be tested within a variety of situations and establish how users interact with portals. This will help to inform the delivery of portals as services within the JISC Information Environment. 

Aims and Objectives  

CREE aims to:

• Assess, test and document user requirements of portal-embedded and non portal-embedded search and resource-push interfaces, together with other aspects of JISC portal functionality and integration, in a broad range of user contexts. Ensure that the results of these actions are disseminated effectively to the HE/FE community.
• Investigate and document generic aspects of adapting a range of existing search tools and toolkits (JAFER toolkit, BALSA, Heirport, Google APIs, cross-search) to be conformant with the WSRP and JSR 168 standards, thus facilitating their integration with any conformant national or institutional portal. Ensure that the results of this activity are 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. Further test this integration with a broad range of users, evaluating the effectiveness of different modes of searching using combinations of embedded and dedicated interfaces. CREE will actively seek other national and institutional portal reference implementations with which to test software components.

A copy of the CREE proposal is available from http://www.hull.ac.uk/imedia/cree/downloads/CREE-prop-public.pdf.