JISC

Start date: 1 September 2002

End date: 31 May 2004

Funding programme: Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) programme

Project website: http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Introduction

The JISC invests significantly in the acquisition of content for use across the FE and HE community in the UK. Traditionally, this content has been hosted by JISC-funded services and data centres, and surfaced within institutions predominantly through multiple disjointed access points. The model has been one in which known, named, bodies of material have been acquired, marketed, accessed and used essentially independently of one another. Within many institutions, awareness raising and delivery of support has predominantly been geared towards researchers and teaching staff, with little realistic prospect of effectively marketing such materials directly to the wider student body. 

With the PORTAL project, we will demonstrate the means by which national JISC-funded services can be surfaced in an integrated fashion. This would facilitate access being given directly to students, as well as to teaching and research staff. Further, through the use of Open Source software and the adoption of an interoperable and standards-compliant methodology, we will provide a solution and associated deployment guidelines and best practice documentation suitable for implementation at other institutions, and with resources originating outside of the JISC sphere. 

This project builds upon strategic directions described in the JISC’s Information Environment strategy, and works to ensure that institutions are capable of integrating with and maximising their utilisation of this exciting vision from the JISC in a manner attuned to institutional realities and priorities.

Aims and Objectives

• A working installation of the Open Source uPortal software at Hull, demonstrating the effective integration of local assets with national content sourced from the RDN and elsewhere
• Demonstrating the use of institutionally held personal and organisational information to tailor the delivery of internal and external assets to the learner
• Active UK engagement with the international development of uPortal
• Dissemination of experiences with integration of national and local assets, portal deployment in general, and uPortal installation and integration specifically, to the wider community
• Raising of awareness throughout the community of the potential for Open Source portal deployment at other institutions
• Engagement with the ongoing debate into the role of institutional and national portals, VLEs, Digital Libraries, and the like
• Establishment of a body of expertise in issues related to the deployment and use of institutional portals within FE and HE
• A series of publicly available management policy briefing papers on issues related to portal deployment within institutions
• A series of publicly available technical briefing papers on issues related to portal installation within institutions.

Overall Approach

The PORTAL project is a partnership between colleagues within Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull and UKOLN, at the University of Bath. It is closely linked with — and collocated to — existing efforts within Academic Services Interactive Media to develop an institutional portal for staff and students of the University of Hull, but also explicitly focussed upon issues surrounding the surfacing and integration of national resources within the institution, such as those funded or procured by the JISC. 

The nature of the partnership means that the project benefits equally from a sound grounding in the institutional realities of portal deployment, and a ‘big picture’ view of current and emerging policy, technology and theory, such as only UKOLN can provide. Use of a UKOLN project manager cements this relationship, ensuring that the project does not focus overly on issues internal to Hull, and providing a valuable means of dissemination for project and programme results, both nationally and internationally. 

Underlying many of PORTALs deliverables is the background of developing a new institutional portal, port.hull, for staff and students at the University of Hull. This development of a real system, already in use by students in two departments and intended for campus-wide rollout at the start of the 2003-4 session, provides an effective platform for showcasing and testing many of PORTALs work packages. Equally, the staff and students of the University of Hull offer a valuable pool of users with whom it will be possible to explore issues of real usage to compare with the more speculative requirements of users elsewhere, who may only be able to express what they want, rather than comment on what they have. This significant body of users local to the developing portal will be compared to staff and students at a number of other institutions of various kinds, and work is currently underway to select the most appropriate institutions for comparative study. 

The development of Hull’s institutional portal lends PORTAL a degree of extra development effort, as well as one ready body of users upon whom to test ideas, and from whom to solicit valuable feedback. However, PORTAL remains a national project, wholly driven by the need to gauge issues of relevance to a range of portal deployment settings. As such, there are occasions in which the needs of the institution and of the project may not be wholly aligned, and this will need to be managed. In reality, this is only likely to occur in cases where generic, ‘best practice’, recommendations emerging from PORTAL’s more research-oriented work packages are not wholly implementable within the institutional portal at this time. We recognise the possibility of such differences arising, but do not anticipate them causing any great problems for the project.

Methodology

Evaluation of user requirements, expectations, and experiences will be conducted in a variety of ways, including literature review, face-to-face interviews at 5-10 Further and Higher Education institutions (of which Hull will be one), marketing (for Hull users) of the comment and feedback mechanisms already offered to them within the developing portal, and analysis (for Hull users) of usage logs. Members of the project team are currently exploring the possibility of utilising a deliverable from Hull’s JISC 5/99-funded project, Iconex, in order to offer an online card-sorting exercise. This exercise supplements a paper-based exercise utilised at Hull over the summer of 2002 in order to establish the most useful layout of tabs within the portal, and is similar to a system used by IBM. The Iconex cards are fully customisable, and could be used in a widely advertised online exercise in order to gain insights into the ways that potential users wish to group, order and structure information and resources within a portal. 

Technical developments on the portal will take place within the Open Source framework of the broader uPortal development activity, and existing development practices within Academic Services Interactive Media will apply. Where content from external sources is to be personalised for the user, it will be necessary to enter into dialogue with the content provider at an early stage in order to gauge what is legally and technically possible in each case, and how the two parties can work together in order to achieve a replicable result of benefit to the broader community. In taking the initiative with their Working with the RDN document, the RDN has shown an extremely valuable way in which similar services might make it easier for institutional portal developers and others to most effectively integrate with their content; to the benefit of the portal and the content provider. Where practical, we would seek to document integration techniques that we utilise in a similar manner.

Interoperability

As a project concerned with integrating content from a variety of sources, effective and achievable interoperability is core to the work of PORTAL. We fully embrace the architecture and philosophies enshrined within the JISC’s Information Environment Architecture, produced by UKOLN, and are cognisant of the public sector-spanning e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), and related developments with which we intend to comply. Standards for the integration of content within portals are under development, with public drafts of the two front runners (WSRP and JSR 168) due during 2003. We will maintain a watching brief on both activities, and will explore possibilities for active engagement should opportunities present themselves. 

The University of Hull has selected the Open Source portal solution, uPortal, as the basis for their institutional portal. This selection was based upon a sound evaluation of products available at the time, and remains valid. The PORTAL project, too, is using uPortal as the basis upon which to develop and test ideas for the integration of local and national content, as outlined in the project bid. We recognise both that uPortal may not be the best choice for every institution, and that our own decision to use it might be different if we revisit the question in 12 months or more, as the marketplace continues to evolve. 

The project is committed to developing in an interoperable, standards compliant fashion, and our interest in emerging ‘portlet’ standards such as WSRP and JSR 168 is one aspect of this, as is the use of related technologies such as OAI, RSS, SOAP and Z39.50. 

The realities of portal technology at the end of 2002 mean that developments within, say, uPortal, are not seamlessly transferable to other portal technologies, but we are working to ensure a minimum of dependence upon uPortal-specific solutions and a full use of available generic solutions. With final versions of the relevant standards due early in 2003, we fully expect to begin producing fully interoperable ‘portlets’ during the lifetime of the project; they may be written in uPortal, but will be seamlessly available to any other standards compliant portal technology. 

Regardless of these short-term technical differences between available portal technologies, the research, consultation and evaluation work packages within PORTAL are wholly unrelated to the underlying technology used, and the findings from these work packages will be as applicable to a JetSpeed or Oracle portal as to uPortal.

Scalability

The deployment of the institutional portal at Hull itself is, of course, being undertaken in a scalable manner. The portal is currently being tested by students from two Hull departments, with two more to be added at the start of the next Semester. We currently anticipate making the portal available to all staff and students from the start of the 2003-4 session. As such, load and traffic on the existing hardware is currently being monitored, and we anticipate addition of a further server being necessary over the Summer of 2003. 

Scalability in terms of the number of resources and services that may meaningfully be aggregated or integrated for the user is an active research activity across the duration of the project. This will begin with activities such as the online card sorting exercise, and progress into observation of the changing use patterns of these resources as users gain access to them via the portal.

Sustainability

The institutional portal, port.hull, is a key plank of the institution’s Digital University Project, which has the backing of senior management. Development of the portal began before funding for this project, and the significant — and ongoing — institutional contribution demonstrates the importance that Hull places upon this project.

Sustainability for the project team and the wider work that they are engaged in for the community is harder to gauge, but the project management will be seeking additional sources of funding in order to maintain and further develop these services, which are likely to become even more important as increasing numbers of UK institutions look to deploy an institutional portal solution.

User Communities

The issues being addressed by PORTAL are of relevance to students and staff across Further and Higher Education, with institutional portals proposed as one means of raising awareness and use of resources and services from within and outside the institution. A number of work packages are explicitly about communicating with these user communities, gaining information about their expectations and requirements and then (in Hull, at least) seeing how well an institutional portal actually meets expectations.

Accessibility

The project team is currently unaware of a portal product that might be considered fully accessible to end users with a range of disabilities, although it is true that the uPortal activity and others are seeking ways to address this shortcoming. Partly, it is an issue with the technologies used, but also with the resources actually being integrated within the portal framework, many of which are far from accessible themselves. 

The institutional portal development at Hull is seeking to ensure that resources available from the portal are also available in other ways that might prove more accessible, and can point to the parallel development of a Content Management System for institutional web content as one part of this drive. The Content Management System, as used in the PORTAL project website for example, produces ‘standard’ pages that are rated ‘A’ by Bobby as well as (automatically) ‘AAA’ pages for use by speech readers and others. 

The PORTAL project web site will therefore be accessible, and we are committed to taking reasonable steps to ensure accessibility of the broader portal development.

Project Consortium

Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull and UKOLN are jointly undertaking the PORTAL project. The University of Hull is the lead partner, with project management from UKOLN. 

The RDNC at UKOLN is also contributing a small number of days’ effort, to assist in integrating RDN content with the portal.