iSchool students Manasee Mahajan and Vruskank Salaskar are putting Testudo to the test. For their INFM 718R final project, the group decided to assist students at Maryland in the course look-up and registration process.

According to their abstract, the aim of this project is to design and implement an information retrieval system that will enable searching for programs and courses offered at the University of Maryland. The current course listing system for UMD is Testudo, which lists courses by departments. In order to find information about a particular course, the user needs to know which department the course belongs to. In reality, students often face the need to find courses and/or departments that offer courses related to a particular topic, e.g. a student might want to look at all courses for “project management”, irrespective of the department in which they are offered. Testudo does not have any feature through which users can perform a university wide topical search of courses. While Testudo has exhaustive course information, it does not give the users options to search for courses topically.

Their system aims to fulfill this information need by providing an alternate and easier way to search for courses. The system we propose will allow users to search for courses across all departments in UMD according to their area of interest by specifying a topic, course name or a department. The system will use the data on Testudo, make it searchable and present it in such a way that it becomes more useful for the university community. The system will also use faceted searching, by providing facets like department name, credits and time on course data, to enable users to drill down the result list. This will enable the search process become easier and powerful at the same time.