NCRM are launching some exciting new features on our website which we are calling ‘NCRM Explore’, including personalised content, and a new way of searching our extensive research methods materials. You can access them at www.ncrm.ac.uk/explore.
NCRM’s website is eleven years young. During that period we have undertaken several major redesigns to reflect the ever-changing tools and styles with which our users are most familiar, as well as essential changes to the underlying technical infrastructure. Over the intervening years we have had the privilege of working with a huge and ever-growing range of social science researchers who have held grants associated with NCRM or contributed to our training programme and Research Methods Festivals. These activities have led to an even wider range of research papers, reports and training materials and a large database of events and publications. For seven years we also hosted the separate ESRC ReStore repository (now a part of the NCRM site), which collated and maintained online resources from other ESRC-funded research methods initiatives. We regularly email thousands of subscribers of our newletters and e-bulletins, quite possibly including yourself! All these riches present a challenge both to us and our users - how best to present and find all the stuff in which each individual is most interested?
In response to this challenge we are introducing NCRM Explore. This allows users to login and receive more customised content. In our first release it includes top recommendations from our recent publications, training courses, videos and podcasts, most recently visited pages and searches, as well as the ability to amend research interests and communication preferences. UK academics can login using their existing institutional details, in just the same way as for online journal access and other ESRC services such as the UK Data Service. Other users are able to create their own NCRM login details. The first time you login you will be asked to tell us about yourself and your research methods interests by selecting from entries in the NCRM research methods typology, with which we annotate all our publications and events.
Once logged in, users can still navigate everywhere else in the NCRM site and you don’t have to be logged in to use our new and powerful Explore search tool which offers many innovations over our present search and provides features with which users will be familiar from other search engines. Users can opt to see best-matching options automatically completed as soon as they start typing. Before or after searching it is possible to filter on a range of NCRM-specific attributes, such as publications, events, items in the ReStore repository and then to further refine results for example by displaying just video or audio content. If you are logged in, we can even tailor these results based on your research interests and save your recent searches for future use.
Of course, we hope that users will see the value of logging in and telling us about themselves and their research interests because this will help us to further tailor web content and communications in future - we have exciting plans for online training materials and research outputs associated with our new projects and would much rather target this information to the NCRM users to whom they are of greatest interest, but some of these developments will only be possible once we start to build up coverage of interests and preferences for a good proportion of our users.
So why not give it a try now? If you’re still not sure, watch the short video at http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/explore.