Four Years of Discovery Improvements for SERC website visitors
Poster Session Part of
Friday Poster Session
Authors
Sean Fox, Carleton College
mahdi mohamed, Carleton College
Monica Bruckner, Carleton College
Ashley Carlson, Carleton College
Cailin Huyck Orr, Carleton College
Ellen Iverson, Carleton College
John McDaris, Carleton College
Kristin O'Connell, Carleton College
The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) hosts materials from more than 120 geoscience education projects. However, the project-focused nature of the SERC website means that information is siloed which presents a challenge to users wanting to benefit from the full breadth of the collections. Over the last 4 years, through the Compass project, we have been making a wide range of improvements to the discovery experience of SERC visitors. Informed by user research, these improvements include new and improved user-visible affordances for navigating the site as well as a host of under-the-hood changes designed to increase the odds that visitors will find resources that will impact their teaching and professional practice. These improvements range from DEI-supporting resource portals and activity search interfaces to recommender systems and search engine tuning. We describe this work and how visitors can make the most of these new features. We will also preview upcoming changes such as AI-powered search and user resource collections, as well as offer the opportunity to participate directly in our research into the resource discovery process across SERC-hosted websites.