Tools for creating your own resource portal: CWIS and the Scout Portal Toolkit

Library Trends, Spring, 2005 by Edward Almasy

ABSTRACT

Creating a full-featured resource portal on the Web is no small task, and it can be even more of a challenge without a team of Web designers and programmers. In the fall of 2000 the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Internet Scout Project (Scout) received funding from the Mellon Foundation to build an open-source software package intended to enable collection developers to share their collection's metadata via the Web. In October of 2002 Scout began a new effort, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative, to build upon prior work and create a software package that would help STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math) content authors and collection developers share their work online and integrate it into NSDL. The software packages resulting from these two projects, the Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) and the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS), are very inexpensive to maintain and operate and easy for nontechnical staff to download, set up, and populate with metadata. Conforming to international standards for metadata, data harvesting, and Web technology makes SPT and CWIS useful for and usable by a wide variety of projects and organizations, allowing and encouraging collaboration and record sharing among projects.

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In today's Internet, with information overload prevalent even within a single discipline, scholars and researchers struggle to find the precise material they need in the tangled web of online information. The major search engines do not offer great precision or any guarantee of authority; the best sites in a given field are spread around the nooks and crannies of the Internet and need to be located and then individually searched for relevant information; and even topical electronic mailing lists can require substantial effort to monitor and sift through to extract useful information. In addition, most scholars and researchers lack the extra time needed to roam the Web trying to stay abreast of all the new resources and tools that, ironically, could save them time by making the task of locating useful information easier.

In some disciplines this problem is being addressed by organizations that take a leadership role by building Web sites called "subject gateways" or "discipline-based resource portals." These Web sites usually focus on a specific topic or scholarly discipline, and they often provide information in a variety of forms and from many sources. For example, a discipline-based portal may feature the following:

* a browsable directory of online resources, described and arranged by subject

* a search facility that includes only resources related to the field and that allows searching by title, author, subject, etc.

* current news stories related to the field

* forums for discussing specific discipline-related issues

* facilities for scholars to comment and share information about specific resources

By bringing together various collections and access points into one integrated Web site, a resource portal can bring coherence to the body of online information available in a given field of study, providing scholars and researchers with a facility that will save them substantial time and increase their awareness of other work in their field.

Given all of the above, a discipline-based resource portal sounds like a fine thing to put online, but building a high-quality portal with even a portion of these facilities can be a daunting undertaking. Although the benefits of setting up a resource portal are clear, many organizations with a strong focus on a particular discipline do not have ready access to extensive technical resources, and even those organizations that do are likely to have those resources already committed to existing projects or working to support the organization's day-to-day operations.

The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) and the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS), open-source software packages developed by the Internet Scout Project under grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation (NSF), respectively, were created to address this problem. They allow a group or organization (or even an ambitious individual) to share a specific knowledge base via a full-featured portal on the Web, with little or no investment in technical resources or infrastructure. In fact, many groups and organizations already have available the minimal resources needed to put a resource portal online using SPT or CWIS.

The Internet Scout Project (Scout), based in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was started in 1994 to develop better tools and services to find, filter, and present online information and metadata. Scout's flagship publication is the Scout Report, an electronic periodical that is published weekly and identifies and describes the best new online resources of interest to educators, students, and researchers. In 1996 the content from the Scout Report and related Scout publications began to be collected into a searchable and browsable online database labeled the Scout Archives. As the Archives grew for the next six years, two things gradually became apparent: (1) that the original Scout Archives infrastructure had outgrown its content and user base, and (2) that there were many other groups and organizations who had the subject knowledge and desire to assemble and share collections of online resources but did not have the needed technical expertise. In 2000, Scout received funding from the Mellon Foundation to develop a software package to meet these needs, and the Scout Portal Toolkit was born.