Access in a Networked World: Scholars Portal in Context

SINCETHE 196os, L I B R A R I A N S HAVE projected a vision of a digital library that offers seamless access to a vast world of scholarly information of all types. Until the 199Os,however, digital technologies lacked the power and capacity to deliver on the vision. During the 199Os, technology plat-forms, networking technoloves, electronic resources, and the evolution of standards matured sufficiently to lay the foundation for the vision to be ful-filled. As this maturation was taking place, the rapid growth of electronic resources was based on numerous proprietary systems making access across such systems impossible. The scholars portal project is an effort to create a search and retrieval tool that will provide an interim solution to this prob-lem until such time as those systems are built on a unified set of standards and data formats. Since the publication of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) white paper on the need for a research library portal (Campbell, Z O O O), the concept of a scholars portal (SP) has generated much interest. Illustra-tive of this interest are what might be described as several independent demonstration projects sponsored by a number of entities including indi-vidual libraries, ARL, ’ the Ontario Council of University Libraries (“What’s New,”2002), and the Council of Australian University Librarians2 Interest in an SP also generically characterizes a number of efforts to create specialized subject portals for researcher^. ^ Initially described as “the place to start for anyone seeking academically sound information” (Campbell, 2000, p. 211), the SP concept has been widely explored, devel-oped, and refined.