UK Centre for Materials Education
Working with you to enhance the student experience
Working with you to enhance the student experience
This project aimed to compile a database of subject specific online resources for Materials students. Commercial search engines, while fast and efficient, do not necessarily provide relevant technical information. With the internet increasingly becoming a source of information and reference for students, the need was felt for an online database which would provide relevant information about the sites being accessed.
The project had as its foundation a collection of useful web resources gathered by the PI. Rather than presenting these as embedded links which the user could browse through, this project intended to create an easily accessible database, which would also provide supplementary information regarding the content and context of the links. The database was set up on an SQL platform, and the page design was kept simple deliberately so as to enable users with slow internet connections to access it. It was searched using keywords, and the results were displayed alphabetically. Along with the usual information regarding site name, URL and site type, this database would also display an abstract, which would immediately indicate whether the web link was relevant to the user’s needs. The site also allowed the user to comment on the relevance of the site and/or submit a link for inclusion, which would then be evaluated by the site’s editor. On conclusion of the project, the database generated by this project was incorporated into the Database of Resources on the UKCME website, and is no longer active as a separate entity.
