| Abstract: | The activities conducted during this study, commissioned by the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), included a literature review, interviews, three regional workshops and an email questionnaire which received responses from several European countries, Australia and the USA. The report concludes that personalisation is effective and feasible in situations where data is controlled and where there is a clear rationale or business case. It identifies several impediments to using personalisation with uncontrolled data, including immature technology and lack of metadata. Personalisation is no substitute for user requirements analysis and user-centred design. In the right circumstances, personalisation can improve efficiency, reveal inadequacies in business processes and allow services and learning materials to be effectively targeted. Accessibility to users of all abilities may be improved by offering options such as switching off graphics, or changing font-sizes or background colours - all Web sites should consider this. True personalisation is more than allowing users to "re-skin" the interface or change the position of screen elements. The report identifies a number of areas where interesting and rewarding work might be done. It does not recommend setting up national services for personalisation or user profiles and it discourages the development of national standards in an area where international de facto standards are still developing. It recommends:
*small pieces of work looking at user requirements and exploring innovative and tightly defined uses of personalisation approaches
*work on sharing user profiles between services, diverse organisations and institutions
*looking at the use of different profiles for an individual user in different roles or different areas of life (work, home, sport, leisure etc)
*institutions use the push for personalisation to ensure that their core data and processes are reliable and efficient, and where they are not to transform them
*the use of a common vocabulary for describing personalisation work in the UK academic community
*the use of consistent standards throughout the community for the use and production of RSS (newsfeeds)
*some research should be done into the uses of customisation and personalisation to extend access to disabled users
*every effort should be made to capitalise on JISC's substantial investment in services and resources. Users may want to use resources through personalised institutional portals or through personalised subject based services. Re-use and multiple use of records and resources available to the UK academic community should be encouraged. To provide personalised services, institutions and subject based services must easily be able to access and share resources. The authors are doubtful of the value of promotion to end users of arcane and hard to comprehend brands such as the RDN (Resource Discovery Network). Promotional activity would be better focussed at service providers, whether institutional or subject-based, encouraging them to use the indisputably valuable resources that comprise the RDN. This applies to JISC services in general. While a multiplicity of interfaces is inevitable and desirable for progress, competition between government funded services for end-user "hits" which leads to restrictive practices and discourages sharing is undesirable. Assessment measures and performance indicators which encourage such restrictive practices should be removed or reformed |
