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Author Archives: Keren Mills
Conclusions and recommendations
The objective to “address the challenges involved in delivering quality academic content to mobile devices” has been largely met. Many of those challenges will take time to resolve, such as the issue of third party materials being provided in formats … Continue reading
Posted in Final project report
Tagged recommendations
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The challenge
The challenge for MACON was to address the difficulties involved in delivering quality academic content to mobile devices in a seamless and user-friendly manner through a resource discovery interface. The purpose of the project was to explore the possibilities and share … Continue reading
Lessons Learnt
Mobile Discovery This project reinforced that developing for mobile devices is complex because of the wide range of operating systems, browsers, screen resolution and processing power that are in common use at present. We also learnt that our users do … Continue reading
Posted in Evaluation, Final project report, Mobile Audiovisual discovery, Mobile bookmarklet tool, Mobile discovery
Tagged method, open data
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The Mobile Advantage
The project has given us the opportunity to verify what our learners want from a single search box for mobiles and to improve the mobile search tool we offer. Working with the EBSCO API has provided our Systems Development team … Continue reading
Background
The Open University is the biggest university in the UK with more than 260,000 students. We are a distance learning university, so very few of our students ever visit the library building in person. Only our ~1200 full time research students … Continue reading
Approaches to improving mobile authentication
One of the aims of the MACON project was to develop a bookmarklet that would allow users to authenticate securely without having to enter their full Open University password every time they wanted to access a mobile e-resource. OU students … Continue reading
Major Outputs
1. Prototype discovery tool for delivery of academic content to mobile devices. The discovery tool draws on the EBSCO API to return search results within the Open University Library’s mobile website. The user requirements and the technical approach for this prototype … Continue reading
Posted in Final project report, Mobile discovery, Project management
Tagged method, progress update
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Usability testing
Usability is an important consideration in any interface design, and can be particularly critical where screen space is limited and input options are fiddly to use. A usable interface will enable users to complete a task with minimum frustration and … Continue reading
Project Board meeting
The second Macon Project Board meeting took place on 25th April 2012. Ron Burns, the project board member representing EBSCO Publishing, joined us via Lync Online Meeting software. Actions from last meeting: Item Action Status 3.1 Users should be given … Continue reading
Posted in Project management
Tagged progress update, project plan
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User requirements report
Aim The purpose of gathering user requirements was to ensure that the development of the mobile search resulted in a user-friendly interface with functionality that would make it useful and attractive to OU students and staff. Method Members of Open … Continue reading
Posted in Evaluation, Mobile discovery
Tagged diary study, progress update, user requirements
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M-Libraries Conference 2012