Development of information architecture and BPPT libraries public information services mashup prototype

Abstract

One of BPPT Library functions is to provide public information to the community. Publishing public information using an easy accessible website is one of the methods to perform this function. The problem occurs when BPPT's Public information is widely spread across different websites. The topic of this study is a mashup, one of the web 2.0 technologies that collects and combines content from online external sources. By using this technology, information that scattered in various sites can be collected, combined and visualized as new information. A mashup requires good information architecture design. This research was intended to acquire information architecture design and to develop BPPT's mashup prototype for public information service. The study was conducted from March 2013 to July 2013 at the BPPT Library. Two mashups were developed during this study. The first mashup is a news related local content collection of BPPT Library. It features news about BPPT related to a certain local content collection. Data about local content collection were taken from the database of BPPTs digital library collections, while the news data is provided by Google Custom Search Engine API. The second mashup is BPPT online news clippings. It combines the latest news about BPPT. Data were taken from data which is provided by news search engine Google, Bing and Yahoo via RSS. A prototype was developed utilizing HTML and CSS. A usability test was conducted in order to evaluate prototype design that has been developed. According to the usability test, features and functions in this mashup prototype were all perceived easy enough to be used by users. This study has proven that mashup technology can be utilized in a library context in order to gather data from online sources that is freely available.