JISC

Start date: 1 August 2003

End date: 31 July 2004

Funding programme: Portals programme

Project website: http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Introduction  

The Subject Portals Project (SPP) was originally funded from September 2001 to August 2003 to improve the functionality of 5 participating RDN hub sites and to develop them into subject portals by developing portal software. These hubs were BIOME, the bio-medical sciences hub; EEVL, the engineering, maths and computer sciences hub; HUMBUL, the humanities hub; PSIGate, the physical sciences hub and SOSIG, the social sciences hub. 

SPP has now been awarded further funding that will focus on the installation, maintenance and continued technical development of the portal software. At the core of this ongoing development is the continuation and expansion of the project’s model of collaborative software development. 

Aims and Objectives  

During phase II, which will run from September 2003 till August 2004, the portal prototype developed by SPP will be installed at the five participating RDN hubs and two extra hubs: ALTIS, the hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism hub and ARTIFACT, the arts and creative industries hub. Phase II will also involve extra interface design, further development of the portal services and development of additional services in parallel with user testing, impact evaluation and dissemination. There will also be further investigation of the integration of portal services within institutional interfaces. It has been recognised that lessons learnt in the first stage of the project have potential utility for others developing portals for learning and teaching who may wish to explore embedding the SPP portlet developments within their own portal environments. 

Overall Approach  

In their simplest form subject portals are filters of Web content that present end users with a tailored view of the Web within a particular subject area. In order to design software tools that simultaneously satisfy the needs of a variety of different sites and make it easier for institutional portals to embed these services in the future, the project is working on a series of Web "portlets" which sit within a portal framework. These portlets include:

• An aggregated cross-search tool operating across both JISC-supported and non-JISC information resources specially selected by the hubs themselves.
• A streamlined account management system, which acts as a trusted broker between the user.
• An authentication service such as Athens on behalf of resource providers.
• A user profiling store.
• Alerting services.
• A range of additional services, such as an aggregated newsfeeds.

Project Consortium  

Members of the consortium are:

• UKOLN, based at the University of Bath, who are responsible for project management.
  <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
• ILRT (Institute for Learning and Research Technology), based at University of Bristol, who are responsible for the technical lead.
  <http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/>
• The RDN Hubs:
  • Altis – Hub for hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism.
    <http://www.altis.ac.uk/>
  • Artifact – Hub for arts and creative industries.
    <http://www.artifact.ac.uk/>
  • BIOME – Hub for biomedical sciences.
    <http://biome.ac.uk/>
  • EEVL – Hub for engineering.
    <http://www.eevl.ac.uk/>
  • GEsource – Hub for geography and the environment.
    <http://www.gesource.ac.uk/home.html>
  • HUMBUL – Hub for humanities.
    <http://www.humbul.ac.uk/>
  • PSIgate – Hub for physical sciences.
    <http://www.psigate.ac.uk/>
  • SOSIG – Hub for social sciences.
    <http://www.sosig.ac.uk/>

During the project life SPP would also anticipate working closely with colleagues involved in other institutional and subject-based portal projects, HILT, the  Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) and other related services.