Catalog Research Testbed
A hosted environment for conducting user research on faceted catalog interfaces.
Overview
The NC State University Libraries Catalog Research Testbed is a tool for developing and evaluating faceted library catalog interfaces. The Testbed provides researchers with a hosted testing environment for conducting user research on faceted catalog interfaces. Features include: extensive customization capabilities, access to a production-quality catalog data source, and fine-grained transaction logging.
How We Did It
Testbed applications use the locally developed CatalogWS platform as an interface to NCSU's catalog of over 1.8M records. Each application can be tailored to the needs of each research study by customizing XSL and CSS files.
Recognition
- Sierra, T., Ryan, J., and Casden, J. (2008). "The ncsu catalog research testbed: a tool for evaluating faceted library catalog interfaces", Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 467-467.
- Sierra, T., Ryan, J., and Casden, J. (2008). "The NCSU Catalog Research Testbed: A Tool for Evaluating Faceted Library Catalog Interfaces", poster for Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 17, 2008. [poster] (Awarded 2nd place for best poster)
![Sierra, T., Ryan, J., and Casden, J. (2008). "The NCSU Catalog Research Testbed: A Tool for Evaluating Faceted Library Catalog Interfaces", poster for Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2008, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 17, 2008. [poster] (Awarded 2nd place for best poster)](/documents/dli/projects/catalogtestbed/jcdl2008-poster.png){kind=link}