A personalised information support system for searching portals and e‐resources

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a personalised information support system to help faculty members to search various portals and e‐resources without typing the search terms in different interfaces and to obtain results re‐ordered without human intervention.Design/methodology/approachAfter a careful survey of various tools and techniques available for computerised client‐centred information services, the study selected to apply web usage mining, proxy level data collection and a vector space retrieval model to develop the personalised information support for teaching and research in a higher education institution.FindingsThere are practical constraints in the implementation stage. There is considerable difficulty in getting real and correct user interests and mapping them effectively into the products and services offered by the library. Also the interests of users change continuously. If multiple users share the same PC, it is difficult to identify the user as there is no one‐to‐one mapping between user and IP address.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper has not considered cases for all the faculty members due to time constraints. The results obtained from the system also need correlation with the sources actually used by the faculty to test its efficacy in a highly fluid research situation like higher academics.Practical implicationsA pragmatic client‐centred information support prototype described in this paper may find use in other institutions needing similar information support.Originality/valueThis paper demonstrates the pragmatic application of ICT for linking users and e‐resources in an academic library.