A key problem for content repositories is that the interfaces they rely on tend to be generic and inflexible and are limited in their ability to provide personalised search results to meet the specific needs of individual researchers and research communities.

Content repositories go a long way towards addressing this problem by improving the probability of a search producing relevant results, but this still leaves the end user to read, skim-read or keyword-search entire documents in order to both ascertain their relevance and locate specific information.

What we did:

PlayGen developed a tool to solve this problem that works as a Firefox extension for entity recognition within research data by being able to scan a web page and identify areas according to the specific interests of an individual user. Scrutiny is able to highlight entities and word context on the web page and provide a mechanism for the user to accept or dismiss individual items.

The benefits:

• Scrutiny forms a lightweight solution to the problem of exploiting the exponentially increasing body information available to the Higher Education community in a way which is fast, efficient and increasingly accurate.

• Scrutiny improves the personalisation of resource discovery by helping to overcome the problem of information over-load.

• Scrutiny is a simple, step-by-step training facility that allows a technically unsophisticated researcher to supply Scrutiny with an entity recognition file.