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

Library Trends, Spring, 2005 by Edward Almasy

Because some sites are very heavily modified and others are not publicly accessible (and, of course, the software is free for download, and registration, while strongly encouraged, is not required), accurately determining the number of active SPT and CWIS installations in the field is not possible. However, the best estimates as of this writing (July 2004) put the total number of active production installations at somewhere between 45 and 60 sites and the number of SPT- or CWIS-based sites under development but not yet available to end users somewhere between 200 and 250. These numbers are expected to dramatically increase within the next year, with the increasing rate of adoption of CWIS by NSDL-related projects and the rapid growth of interest in the OAI-PMH protocol for disseminating collection metadata.

Some of the active CW/S-based sites include the Electronic Environmental Resources Library (http://www.eerl.org), a collection focused on environmental and sustainability resources for community college educators and students; the Journal of Chemical Education's JCE-DLib repository (http:// resgenchem15.chem.wisc.edu/spt/), which catalogs chemical education resources; and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistical Education's CAUSEweb project (http://www.causeweb.org/resources/). Active SPT-based sites include Duke University Libraries' Classical Music Resources collection (http://www.lib.duke.edu/dw3/), the Tibetan & Himalayan Digital Library bibliography database (http://datastore.lib. virginia.edu/tibet/spt/), and the British Columbia History Portal (http:// bchistoryportal.tc.ca/). SPT has also been used for several projects where Scout has had a more direct role, including LearningLanguages.Net (http:// learninglanguages.net), a site collecting Spanish, French, and Japanese language education resources for K-12 students and teachers, and Access NSDL (http://accessnsd.org), a portal intended to help NSDL collection builders and service projects cope with online accessibility issues. And, of course, one of the largest and most active SPT-based installations is Scout's own Scout Archives (http://scout.wisc.edu/Archives/), which catalogs more than 17,000 online resources culled from the past ten years of Scout publications. All of these sites and more can be found on Scout's SPT/CWIS site list (http://scout.wisc.edn/Projects/SPTCWISSites/), which is periodically updated to list new public installation of the software.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation, respectively, the Scout Portal Toolkit and CWIS were developed by Edward Almasy, Barry Wiegan, Andy Yaco-Mink, Rachael Bower, and David Sleasman. CWIS and SPT are open-source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl. txt) and available at no charge.

REFERENCES

Backend.Userland.com. (2003). RSS 0.92. Retrieved November 20, 2004, from http://backend.userland.com/rss092.>