The ARL Scholars Portal Working Group was established in 2000 to advance the concept of a collective research library presence on the Web. On 2 May 2002, there was a public news release that a Scholars Portal Project was being launched by several ARL member libraries (a subset of the working group) in collaboration with ARL and Fretwell-Downing, Inc (FD). This report summarizes the work of the Scholars Portal Working Group from its inception, including the group's sense of key portal features and functionality. The report concludes with a recommendation to the ARL Board to discharge the pants concluded that it was necessary to increase the research library presence on the Web by advancing the concept of a "library.org."
Jerry Campbell, Chief Information Officer and Dean of University Libraries, University of Southern California, advanced that idea in a white paper he prepared for discussion by the ARL membership at their May 2000 meeting. Campbell's paper asked the ARL membership to consider what role the Association should play in portal development for the scholarly community.1 He suggested that ARL seriously pursue the feasibility of developing a "library.org" Web presence. Campbell argued for a collaborative partnership approach, and asserted that research librarians are better qualified to create a Scholars Portal than anyone else is. Campbell was the first to articulate some of the key features and functionality of such a portal. He suggested that the portal should include high-quality content, be based on standards, search across multiple and disparate databases, offer a variety of supporting tools (e.g. authoring, personalized filtering, and resource management), offer enhanced supporting services such as digital reference, and integrate electronic thesauri. Campbell asserted that this portal would be "the place to start for anyone seeking academically sound information."
The general concept of a Scholars Portal and resources to be included in it were further developed and refined in discussions at the October 2000 ARL Membership Meeting, at which then-ARL President Ken Frazier convened an open forum of approximately 45 ARL member leaders to discuss the Campbell proposal for a Scholars Portal. The discussion highlighted a range of views around the following points: the relationship of a Scholars Portal to an online integrated catalog; the role of OCLC's Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC); search software; the role of a portal in supporting interactive scholarly communities; the relationship between value, quality, and traffic; audience; research on the use and effectiveness of a portal; and how to get started.
The concept of a Scholars Portal was also raised in a paper by Sarah Thomas, presented at the November 2000 Library of Congress "Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control."2 Thomas built on Campbell's thesis in her article, and was one of the first to assert that the emphasis should be on the identification of many new resources of value to the scholar and researcher, rather than on the cataloging of only a few, relatively speaking, new items. She coined a new word: "portalog."
The initiative gained real momentum with the establishment of the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group in late 2000. There were two cornerstone principles that motivated the working group in its deliberations:
In early spring 2001, the working group met and confirmed that the ultimate goal was the development of a suite of scholarly productivity tools and services but that it was essential to define an initial first step toward this ambitious goal. The initial step was defined as the development of what Brian Schottlaender termed a "super discovery tool." This tool needs to search, aggregate, integrate, and deliver licensed and openly available digital content across a broad range of subject fields and from multiple institutions. Members of the working group agreed early on that it was not desirable for ARL to develop the tool itself, but to identify potential partners (commercial and otherwise) with whom to collaborate in the tool's development.
At that time, just over one year ago, finding a way to describe in any detail what the Working Group meant by the concept of such a "super discovery tool" was not easy. It was approached in two ways. First, Sarah Pritchard prepared a User Scenario that described the concept from the point of view of an undergraduate. This scenario went a long way toward bringing the concept to life for the Working Group and for others. In addition, the Working Group developed a list of key features, functionality, and categories of content that it felt were required or highly desirable for the "super discovery tool," as well as some other general features of a portal. That list, "Portal Features and Functionality: First Phase" (included as Appendix A), was used in the working group's environmental scan to identify potential partners.
The critical core features of the tool can be summarized as follows:
The list of Portal Features and Functionality was enhanced and refined during the several months of the environmental scan but has not been updated since June 2001. It is included here, however, as a record of the working group efforts that led to the launch of the Scholars Portal Project.
In an effort to identify potential partners, the working group conducted an environmental scan that identified a wide range of companies and products described as "portals." Over 30 products were identified; some were reviewed and determined to be out of scope of the goals of the Scholars Portal because they organized internal records and/or searched only Web resources. The working group was looking for an organization or company that was ready and willing to engage in a collaborative project using extant software rather than an organization wanting to develop a product from scratch. As a result, several potential collaborators were not pursued because the working group felt that they were not in a position to work in a collaborative environment with research libraries or were demonstrating signs of being overextended in their current marketplace. Several companies and products were of sufficient interest to warrant additional research and working group contact with the company.
In addition to the development of the questions regarding "Portal Features and Functionality" and the completion of the environmental scan, a third activity of the working group during this period was the development of a project plan that considered options for: phases of the project, how to develop the discovery tool, financial strategies (developmental and operational), market deployment (integrating the tool into the work environment of the user), and key considerations to influence working group decisions made about the development of the project. The working group was also in the early stages of developing a communication strategy and process for integrating feedback about their work back into their planning process.
The working group's May 2001 report to the ARL membership included the "User Scenario for the ARL Scholars Portal" developed by Sarah Pritchard and a recommendation for the construction of a suite of Web-based services that will connect the higher education community as directly as possible with high-quality information resources that contribute to the teaching and learning process and that advance research.3 The report emphasized that the working group's initial focus was on the "single-search" discovery tool that enables a user to search across certain limited but diverse and distributed Web sites, library catalogs, and databases of information resources to retrieve and integrate the results in a single presentation.
At the May 2001 ARL Business Meeting, Brian Schottlaender summarized the activities of the working group and identified 10 organizations and companies that might be potential partners on this project.4 Schottlaender noted that it was not clear to the working group whether it was either necessary or desirable that the group collaborate with only one partner to the exclusion of others. He did stress that the working group needed to balance the impetus to move ahead expeditiously with the need to refine further the thinking about the "Portal Features and Functionality" for the single-search discovery tool. The working group agreed to continue to use the term "Scholars Portal" for convenience, even though the phrase raised questions. Schottlaender also emphasized that the initiative's larger objective remained the development of a full suite of scholarly productivity tools, functioning with the "single-search" discovery tool, to create a new academic platform for members of the research and higher education communities.
The working group convened by conference call on 13 July 2001 to review the results of the environmental scan, using the list of "Portal Features and Functionality" as the basis for evaluating various companies and products. Reaffirming its strong desire to implement a project in fall of 2001, the working group reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the several products, evaluated the readiness of the various vendors to engage in a project in the fall 2001, and agreed that working with one vendor in a project was preferred over working with two or more vendors or simply calling for competition in the marketplace. The working group also briefly discussed business models and explored options for establishing an operational project. At this time, the working group considered Phase One to be the planning efforts up to the point participants implementing software, and Phase Two to be the implementation of the software. From that discussion, the group submitted its recommendations to the ARL Board of Directors.
At its July 2001 meeting, the ARL Board of Directors reviewed the working group's recommendations to take the following steps:
The ARL Board supported the Scholars Portal Working Group recommendations and specified that neither the working group nor the vendor should describe the project as a commitment on the part of other ARL libraries to use the product nor that this particular product carried an "ARL imprimatur." The Board also asked ARL staff to continue to monitor other vendor developments and library applications of search engines and resource integration software tools and to develop a set of "best practices" of the functionality and service options in various portal implementations.
Jerry Campbell gave an update report at the October 2001 ARL Membership Meeting.5 He noted that the working group had identified a vendor whose existing products offered about 80 percent of what the working group thought was needed to deploy a discovery tool that offers a critical mass, if not all, of the working group's desired features and capabilities. He also noted that the vendor was interested in collaborating with the working group to build the other 20 percent of the desired features and that they were offering to contribute some of the development time needed to do so. At that time, ARL staff had begun negotiating a contract with the vendor. Campbell extended an invitation to other ARL member libraries to join as project participants.
Brian Schottlaender gave a presentation6 at the ARL Forum on Collections & Access for the 21st Century Scholars in October 2001 on the subject of post-resource discovery portal functionality. Schottlaender reiterated to Forum attendees that development of the super discovery tool was only the initial focus of the working group's attention. Their larger ambition was the development of a full suite of scholarly productivity tools and services, of which the super discovery tool will be but one feature. Schottlaender identified at least five areas of scholarly activity in which post-discovery tools would be welcome, including: capture, integration, manipulation, distribution, and consultation.
Contract negotiations were more protracted than either side expected. A press release was issued on 2 May 2002 announcing the launch of the Scholars Portal Project, a collaboration between several ARL member libraries and Fretwell-Downing, Inc. (FD).7 Taking the advice of the ARL Board, the project participants made explicit in their arrangements with FD that ARL's collaboration with the ARL member libraries on this project is not an Association endorsement of FD products. The initial libraries participating in the project are the University of Southern California; University of California, San Diego; Dartmouth College; University of Arizona; Arizona State University; Iowa State University; and the University of Utah. Plans call for expanding the number of participating libraries over the course of the three-year project. Any ARL member library interested in joining the project is invited and encouraged to contact ARL's Mary Jackson.
Initially the Scholars Portal Project will use several FD products, including ZPORTAL, as a base to deliver cross-domain searching of licensed and openly available content in a range of subject fields and from multiple institutions. The portal will aggregate and integrate the results of the search, and support delivery of the content to the user. Future phases will add other services to the portal that improve user access to, and use of, information resources. For example, planned enhancements include integration of the searching tool within the local online learning environment for a course and linkage to a 24/7 digital reference service to consult with a reference librarian.
The project with Fretwell-Downing is not the only area of work that the working group has been tracking. However, because "Scholars Portal" as a label is now so closely connected to the Project, members of the working group recommend discharging the Scholars Portal Working Group and subdividing the ongoing work between two new groups. First, the Scholars Portal Working Group recommends establishing a new ARL Working Group that would carry on with a broad charge to monitor how libraries are integrating portal technology into their new academic platforms and to identify common issues or barriers to successful implementations. In addition, as part of the Scholars Portal Project, a Project Steering Committee has been established and includes a representative from each participating library to provide project policy oversight for the duration of the project. It is hoped that some Scholars Portal Project participants will also serve on the new Working Group and other libraries will join this new ARL effort to monitor activity broadly in this arena.
The Scholars Portal Working Group expects that the Scholars Portal Project will demonstrate the viability of the Scholars Portal vision with one vendor's products. The libraries participating in the project sought and received ARL's ongoing involvement because they believe that this will spur all vendors-including but not limited to Fretwell-Downing-to work even harder to create or enhance products that serve the needs of research library communities. Even as the Scholars Portal Project is launched, other ARL members are working on similar projects with other vendors. At the same time, ARL staff continue to monitor portal software applications, will host a meeting on 14 June 2002 in Atlanta where librarians and vendors may come together to hear reports by librarians on their portal implementations, and will issue a call for vendors of portal products to establish a Developers Group. Essentially, ARL's involvement in the Scholars Portal Project and related activities is aimed to encourage multiple vendors to develop and enhance portal software tools that will serve well the constituencies of academic and research communities.
1. Jerry D. Campbell, "The Case for Creating a Scholars Portal to the Web: A White Paper," ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 211 (August 2000): 1-4, http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/index.shtml.
2. Sarah Thomas, "Abundance, Attention, and Access: Of Portals and Catalogs," ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 212 (October 2000): 1-3, http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/br/index.shtml.
3. "ARL Scholars Portal Working Group Report," Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, May 2001,.
4. "Update to the ARL Members from the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group, ARL Business Meeting," Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 24 May 2001,.
5. "Report from the Scholars Portal Working Group, ARL Business Meeting," Proceedings of the 139th Association of Research Libraries Membership Meeting, Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 18 October 2001,.
6. Brian E.C. Schottlaender, "The New Academic Platform" Beyond Resource Discovery." http://www.arl.org/forum/schottlaender/index.htm.
7. "ARL Announces…Seven ARL Libraries Launch Scholars Portal Project in Collaboration with Fretwell-Downing, Inc.," Washington, D.C.: Association of Research Libraries, 1 May 2002, .
Portal Features and Functionality: First Phase
Developed by the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group June 2001
This outline of features and functionality was developed to aid the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group in its environmental scan of potential portal products during the spring and early summer of 2001. Because the working group decided to focus initially on a "super discovery tool," this list reflects a bias toward features found in search tools. The list was not designed to be comprehensive, but represents the features and functionality that working group members articulated as their highest priority for a first step in a project. In spring 2001, the working group was not aware of any readily available list of portal features or functional requirements, so the working group developed this list as an aid in their understanding of existing products. The working group was and is aware that required and desirable features in a portal will evolve over time. This list represents the views of the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group as of June 2001 and has not been kept up to date.
General Information
Fall 2001 Pilot
Patron Authentication
User Interface
Search Engine
Search Results
Linkages with other Systems
Miscellaneous
Partnership
Financial Issues