JIBS meeting with Intute

At the JIBS USer Group Committee meeting on 16th November we met with Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk)
Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute and Jackie Wickham, Intute: Health & Life Sciences Manager gave an overview of past and present Intute activity and future plans. Specifically they described current services including the Intute harvester and embedding tools. Work on the Leeds University embedding case study was articulated by Jackie. In addition, Caroline highlighted the results of the Intute Survey of Academic Use of the Internet: a published account to the survey will be made available in due course.

JIBS expressed significant interest in: embedding Intute in library websites and portals, in the potential for cross-searching/federated search, in lessons that could be learnt from functionality available in Google Scholar e.g. openURL resolver, and including different materials and associated search functionality e.g. images. The Group raised a number of issues associated with the existing service: duplication of records, currency of records, ability to distinguish between free and subscription resources easily, potential to extend e-journal listings, repeated entries in the harvester, resources appearing in subject areas that might be unexpected, gaps in the subject coverage and uneven spread of resources across subject areas.

Intute welcomed this feedback and intends to use it to inform service development. JIBS and Intute are currently in discussion about setting up an Enhancement Group.