Software


We evaluated portal software packages like iVia and the Scout Internet Portal Toolkit and studied the work being done with Cornell's VIVO project as well as portal projects outside academia (e.g., The Kauffman Foundation's Entrepreneurship Portal).  

 



We ultimately settled on the CWIS (Collection Workflow Integration System) subset of the Scout Internet Portal Toolkit as a way to build the resources database we envisioned for our portal but we were not happy with the "table-happy" design of the CWIS front-end.  



Initially we planned to just develop a separate "welcoming" page that linked to the CWIS database but later realized what we really wanted was the interactive community aspects that a weblog offered and a well-organized resources database.   Adding WordPress to the mix and then fleshing it out with a few locally-designed widgets combined with the slightly tweaked CWIS resource database and forum pieces helped up put together a product that met our four basic design goals: 



  • a way to foster/build community between our liaison librarians and researchers

  • an improvement over the static "subject guides" we produced for various areas of study

  • user-friendly interface on back end for data entry/resource maintenance by librarians

  • a way to build collections of digital resources and highlight their utility to researchers


With WordPress we get a blog (useful for the librarians to post news, notes and other items of interest to the portal’s users) and with a bit of CSS magic we tip in the CWIS resources database to present a single, virtual portal for our users.   We were also able to take advantage of support for static pages within the WordPress portion of our portal. That facility combined with a bit of code (and the magpierss parser) enabled us to offer Table of Contents feeds from relevant journals (for example, the "Latest Issues" tab on our Bioinformatics portal). 


Having built a MyLibrary site a few years ago (and watched it atrophy due to a lack of interest from those responsible for developing content), we now appreciate that getting the technology right is important but having a simple and flexible set of data-entry modules for librarians and subject specialists is probably more important. If they don’t build and maintain the content, nothing much happens. Fortunately, both WordPress and SPT offer very nice web-based administrative modules that our librarians can quickly master with very little training.


We won’t worry as much about personalization for this portal as we did during our MyLibrary phase (a few years ago my colleague Jimmy Ghaphery at Virginia Commonwealth reported that only 5-10% of the users of their MyLibrary system bothered to personalize—our numbers were even lower). I’m willing to bet that narrowing the focus of the portal to a specific discipline will reduce the overall need for personalization. If I’m wrong about that all is not lost—the SPT-CWIS modules we’re using (resource database, recommender system and discussion forums) do support both personalization and customization so the capability will be there should we need to expose it.


-- Wally Grotophorst

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