Jeanette Sutton is a Development Lead (Associate) with Iriss. She is responsible for the maintenance and development of the ASPire Hub and is also co-leading Iriss's professional curiosity project.
It’s unbelievable how much the ASPire Hub has grown in its 15 months of life. Now, just like a toddler, it’s got more confidence, and wants to show off a bit. As its curator/caretaker, I’d like to introduce you to a new feature – searching by type of resource. This doesn’t replace the usual way of searching, but it does allow you to finesse your search, and browse in a different way.
Let me give you an example. One of the things I’m very fond of on the ASPire Hub is the growing number of leaflets and videos about ASP topics that are aimed at the public. From the video on financial harm to Fife’s suite of Easy Read leaflets (that they so generously shared with the ASPire Hub), to a booklet from the Encompass Network aimed directly at women involved in commercial sexual exploitation, there is a bounty of material that directly helps folk understand ASP. Now you can browse all of it in one place – simply choose ‘public-facing material’ from the ‘type’ drop-down menu, leave the other fields blank, and you’ll find all the resources suitable for the public.
Another ‘type’ is learning material. Frances Toland of Renfrewshire, who wrote our very first guest blog, once asked me if I’d consider a mechanism where she could easily find learning material on the ASPire Hub. Well, it’s now one of our new ways of searching under ‘type’. Everything in the 'learning material' section can be used for professional development in some way – whether that’s Powerpoint presentations, e-learning, or reflective exercises.
The other thing that should really help usability is that you can also search both by ‘topic’ and ‘type’. Thanks largely to the brilliant National Chronologies Group and their contributions, the ASPire Hub has a very healthy ‘chronologies’ section. But what if you were looking specifically for other areas’ guidance on chronologies? Simple – select ‘chronologies’ from ‘topic’ and ‘local guidance and frameworks’ from ‘type’, and you’ll find three interesting examples of local guidance on chronologies. And if you don’t turn up anything? To widen your search, just remove the ‘type’ to see everything in the topic, as before.
This change gives the ASPire Hub plenty of new avenues to explore in the future, too. The eagle-eyed among you might notice a new ‘type’ called ‘practice examples’. We don’t have many of these at present. But this might change in the future…
I hope you enjoy this new way to explore the breadth of resources about ASP in Scotland. As always, I welcome your feedback, love your contributions, and humbly ask you to spread the word about the ASPire Hub’s new feature!
