Portals: People, Processes and Technology

Citation

Barker, P. (2007), "Portals: People, Processes and Technology", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 378-379. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470710754913

In bygone days the word “portal” was used to describe a large and imposing entrance into a castle or a big country house. Its modern web‐related usage has similar connotations – an entrance or a gateway that provides access to an organisation's web‐based information (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/portal for a discussion of this). Over the last few years, software portals have become an important way of advertising an organisation's wares and also controlling access to these. This book is therefore a timely one in that it brings together a useful collection of experience gained from a number of different research and development perspectives. It contains an edited collection of 17 contributions that are organised into five basic sections. These deal with: core themes, the library and the portal, the portal in the corporate sector, portals in the public sector and the future.

The core studies section of the book (Chapters 1 through 6) deals with some of the introductory and background material that is needed to understand portals, the functions that they provide and how they might be used to provide access to an organisation's electronic resources. The chapters in this section therefore provide some basic definitions and a discussion of the architecture of portals. Design options and management issues are also considered. Some of the other important topics discussed in this part of the book include personalisation initiatives, portals as information filters, user needs analysis, usability testing and evaluation.

The three chapters that make up the second part of the book deal specifically with the use of portals in library systems. These chapters nicely summarise the important activities of information professionals in relation to portals – namely guiding users, organising information, contributing content and involvement in building them. Particular topics that are discussed in this section include portals to university libraries, the role of the OPAC within a portal system and the provision of other access facilities such as cross‐searching of multiple databases (using the Z39.50 protocol), OpenURL resolvers, service aggregation and access to institutional document repositories. There are some useful reviews of the portal services provided by a number of commercial organisations (such as Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and MSN) and other subject‐based portals (for example, the UK's Resource Discovery Network and the National Library for Health).

In the third section of the book (which covers portals in the corporate sector) there are just two chapters. The first of these describes and discusses the functions and potential benefits (and drawbacks) of business‐to‐employee (B2E) portals as a mechanism for providing ubiquitous access to information for a corporate workforce. The second contribution outlines the use of “EIPs” – enterprise information portals. This chapter emphasises the need to be able to integrate business intelligence, knowledge management and group collaboration tools within a portal environment. Together, these chapters provide some useful illustrations and examples of what can be achieved at the corporate level using this type of software technology.

The part of the book that deals with portals in the public sector contains three essays. Of these, the first considers some of the pros and cons of community portals. The author subdivides these into two broad categories (civic and civil) and describes the interface between them in terms of an “e‐confluence zone”. The other two essays in this section are each dedicated to university‐based activity in relation to portal implementation and use. The first of these presents a comparative analysis of portal developments within UK higher education institutions (based on a sample of 47 sites) while the other describes a case study involving the University of Utrecht's portal (called MyUU). Each of these chapters seem to reflect a “dilemma” that currently exists in relation to “which way to go” and what portal product to use.

In the final part of the book (Chapters 15 through 17), each of the contributions considers “the future” of portals and their uptake. The lead chapter in this section describes subject‐based, media‐based and community‐based portals and the future need to explore how portal services interact with the newly emerging personal learning environments. Subsequent chapters then discuss, respectively: the future use of portals for managing web‐based information in arts and humanities; and the implications of Web 2.0 in relation to the development of portals. Another important consideration – that is hinted at in several parts of the book – is the future relationship between portals and open access publication.

Overall, I think this is quite an interesting book that unpicks a number of problems and issues relating to the successful institutional use of portals – especially within library systems. Naturally, there are many problems still to be overcome in this particular area. Indeed, as one of the contributors to this volume writes (p. 113): “the development of an effective, fully integrated academic library portal is a task of the utmost importance”.