Designing Portals: Opportunities and Challenges

Citation

Calvert, P. (2003), "Designing Portals: Opportunities and Challenges", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 294-295. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310489159

There cannot be many information managers who have not yet encountered the concept of portals or gateways. Portals come in all shapes and sizes, with some of the oldest and best‐known ones being Yahoo! and Excite. Indeed, as soon as the Web was functioning and we had Mosaic software, functioning links became standard on almost any site, and library sites have usually acted as information clearing‐houses. The development of more specific portals came in the late 1990s; for example, sites such as the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/). Jafari (with Sheehan) starts this book by providing interesting history and background to the development of the portal concept, and then he gives us an excellent chapter on the ABCs of designing campus portals. The editors have chosen 12 more chapters by authors based in the USA and Canada. It is a pity that libraries receive little attention in this book but anyone working on a higher education library portal will surely find something here of use to them.

A major theme to emerge from this book is that building a portal is as much about establishing cross‐campus communication networks as it is about the design of the interface and content. This presents a strategic challenge to those given the task of creating an academic portal and, though several chapters discuss the point, Anne Yandell Bishop’s description of the process of stakeholder focus groups used by Wake Forest University (USA) is helpful. An interesting point is that, while some services attract low interest from business staff and hence may be sidelined early in the process, the same services may reap huge benefits for campus customers, so it is important that someone speaks for them in the planning stages – Yandell’s example of car‐parking permits may not seem exciting, but who will deny that getting parking permits can be a source of frustration when not handled efficiently?

Using Strauss’s definition, a true portal is a customised Web page in which the format and content are based upon information about the user stored in the portal’s database. Anyone who actively uses Amazon.com will be familiar with how this can work and, if done well, it is a win‐win situation for both the customer and the organisation. Converted into an information service setting, this becomes the “my library” concept. There are many universities experimenting with this idea, the MyLibrary knowledge portal of Cornell University Library (http://mylibrary.cornell.edu:8080/MyLibrary/index.jsp) is a good example to follow. Though this book has no specific examples of library portals, the chapter by Graves and Hale comes closest to describing the requirements for a successful enterprise portal.

For information managers working with higher education portals, this is an essential read. It will be useful to librarians creating portals, though it does not deal with library portals directly. As a minor quibble, the index is fairly slim (a failing I find in quite a few books from the Idea Group), but otherwise this is an impressive book for the price.