JISC Summer of Student Innovation – Funding for your big idea!

We’re getting excited about the JISC Summer of Student Innovation! JISC are running a competition to fund students who have bright ideas about using technology to improve student life. The closing date is 30th May 2014, so get going!

If you have an idea, get in touch with education@cardiff.ac.uk for help and advice. Then write a 300-500 word summary of your idea, create a 2-5 minute video, and finally a 120-character description. More information is available at the JISC Summer of Student Innovation website: http://elevator.jisc.ac.uk/sosi14/

We can’t enter ourselves (we’re a library), but we can’t help thinking how we’d enter if we could. How’s this for technology to help students:

LibrarySearch – Find and manage the items you need to study!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQbWnK_zHrM?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360]

LibrarySearch (http://librarysearch.cf.ac.uk) is Cardiff University’s online library catalogue. It does more than just help you find books and other items: you can read items online; save items and searches; tag items; and even rate items and write reviews!

Here’s an example: Dylan is writing an essay on dragonology. He uses LibrarySearch to search for the keywords relating to his essay, and gets lots of results. He saves the search so he can come back to it later. He starts saving the books he wants: so he can find them when he gets to the library, and generate a bibliography to include at the end of his essay. He adds tags to some of the items to remind himself what they’re about. Finally, he has a cuppa and reads some of the eJournal articles and eBooks, and rates them so other students know which ones to read (or avoid!). Dylan saves loads of time and effort, and can now write an even better essay!

 Key deliverables

• Library catalogue that does more than just find books
• Includes features like saved searches, saved items, user tagging and user reviews
• Available online (http://librarysearch.cf.ac.uk), in the libraries or on your own device

 About Cardiff University Library Service

We’re not really a student: we’re more a giant collection of libraries serving the students and staff of Cardiff University. So we’re not allowed to enter JISC’s Summer of Student Innovation, but if we were, this is the kind of thing we’d come up with! If you’re a Cardiff University student, and you have an idea for a technology that could help people at uni, get in touch with education@cardiff.ac.uk .