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Subject Portals Development Project

Subject Portals Development Project. …overview. Judith Clark judi.clark@kcl.ac.uk. The Background. The Resource Discovery Network:.

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Subject Portals Development Project

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  1. Subject Portals Development Project …overview Judith Clark judi.clark@kcl.ac.uk

  2. The Background The Resource Discovery Network: • Subject gateways were developed as part of the JISC’s e-lib project - quality-tested databases of Internet resources described and catalogued by specialists in UK HE institutions and other partner organisations • subject gateways > hubs > portals • Hubs to be ‘portalised’: • EEVL - engineering • Omni (now BIOME) - health and medicine • SOSIG - social sciences

  3. RDN: a network enterprise Geography & Environment EEVL Humbul Arts & Creative Industries Sport, Tourism & Leisure

  4. RDN - the network behind the portals • A network of subject experts and a distributed organisational structure - collaborating to deliver portal services • RDN-i ‘button service’ cross-searches three hubs, other RDN services being developed (RSS, harvesting)

  5. The challenges ahead Tension between • Enterprise (conventional) portal functionality • DNER portalisation strategy

  6. Portalisation of hubs • RSS files as a means of sharing news and alerts about new resources added to the network • SOSIG already offers registered users access to a range of relevant RSS files and e-mail alerts • Visit SOSIG’s My Account pages to find out more

  7. Enterprise portals Are different… • Knowledge management - the learning organisation - productivity • information creation, sharing and collaboration • user focused, built on an understanding of the needs of users and integrated with business strategies

  8. “DNER Portalisation” • The RDN is developing prototype portals as part of the JISC’s Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) • These portals will add content from the JISC’s collections to RDN’s data and make data from a variety of distributed datasets and a variety of publishers available to users through a single interface • DNER Architecture uses Z39.50

  9. Presentation services • DNER vision encompasses many kinds of presentation services, including... • subject portals • image portal • geo-browser portals • shallow portal (linking) • deep portal (richer discovery and use functionality including cross-search)

  10. DNER Shared services • authentication • authorisation • collection description • service description • location • user preferences/profiling • thesauri/terminology • metadata registry • (ratings, terms & conditions) key desirable

  11. BUT... • The ‘glue’ between the RDN portals and the wider DNER is those shared services, which exist only in the realm of the DNER vision. Hence, The Subject Portals DevelopmentProject aka. ‘SAD One’ !

  12. Subject portals Present a selection of relevant heterogeneous resources • Journal articles, A&I tools, union catalogues, search engines, image collections, resource catalogues, and more

  13. User functionality Two areas in particular… discover/survey (finding stuff from multiple content providers) use record (annotate, sort, email, save records)

  14. Discover/Survey • portals expose Web content for machine use (Z39.50 m2m search) • may expose metadata using search, harvesting or alerting protocols • may provide options for the end-user to link to a network service (p2m)

  15. Use Record • Add to links basket, create pathways, add to bookmarks list • annotate, sort, select, proceed to further discovery activities • proceed to locate, request/access, UseResource

  16. Managing user expectations • How best to help users to understand the difference between searching at a hub and at a portal? • hubs are based on a library model while portals are inherently Web-y • How important to users is the faculty-level approach?

  17. Meeting learners’ needs • Can portals get away from the one-size-fits-all approach to cater to individual learning styles? • Can they be a truly educational environment, i.e. how do we embed instructional material and cater for novices without frustrating more experienced users (the paperclip problem)?

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