Lessons and outcomes from the Subject Portals Project
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Pages | 58-63 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/03055720510588498 |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Author | Marieke Guy |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Lessons and outcomes from the
Subject Portals Project
Marieke Guy
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, UK
Abstract
Purpose – The paper proposes to investigate the purpose of the Subject Portals Project and the
viability of using Open Source (OS).
Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes the Subject Portals Project.
Findings – The paper finds that the purpose of the Subject Portals Project was to enable the
participating RDN hubs to become portals, implying an ability to integrate third-party content and
provide customised use. Portal functionality is key to presentation of data to end users, and so also
vital to the Information Environment concept. A supplementary approach is to create portable
functions or portlets that can be incorporated into other services.
Originality/value – The paper is useful to those planning to implement Subject Portals Project.
Keywords Portals, Informationretrieval, Further education,Higher education
Paper type Research paper
Introduction to SPP
The RDN Subject Portals Project (SPP) (www.portal.ac.uk/spp/) was funded by Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) to improve the functionality of five
participating RDN hub sites by developing them into subject portals. By doing so
SPP will provide a subject-based presentational layer for the JISC Information
Environment (IE) as well as additional services for RDN users.
In their simplest form, subject portals are aggregators of third party content that
present end users with a tailored view of the web within a particular subject area.
However, during the project it became clear that the development of alternative means
of accessing content through institutional portals, virtual learning environments
(VLEs), etc., would have an impact on the original focus for the creation of
subject-based services. Therefore, in addition to creating these services, SPP’s
development strategy has been to create portable functionality, which could be
embedded into a variety of other environments. This was achieved by the creation of a
series of “portlets” designed to sit within a portal framework. The portlet approach
means that the hubs have a choice of the functions they install, and the aim of the
modular design is that the portlets developed will be non-framework specific and could
be embedded in other portal environments.
The hub sites involved in SPP were BIOME (University of Nottingham) (http://
biome.ac.uk/)[1]; EEVL (Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh) (www.eevl.ac.uk/)[2];
HUMBUL (University of Oxford) (www.humbul.ac.uk/)[3]; and SOSIG (University of
Bristol) (www.sosig.ac.uk/)[4]. The project manager was based in UKOLN (www.
ukoln.ac.uk/) at the University of Bath and the technical development was led by ILRT
at the University of Bristol (www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/). PSIGate (University of Manchester)
(www.psigate.ac.uk/)[5] and the Maths Portal Project (University of Birmingham)
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister www.emeraldinsight.com/0305-5728.htm
VINE
35,1/2
58
VINE: The journal of information and
knowledge management systems
Vol. 35 No. 1/2, 2005
pp. 58-63
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0305-5728
DOI 10.1108/03055720510588498
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