Implementing portal functionality at Wageningen UR Library: combining the old with the new

Abstract

Library Wageningen UR is a relatively small, but highly specialized academic library serving a population of about 5900 researchers and 4700 students in the life sciences. To better serve the needs of our users portal functionality has been introduced gradually to our Desktop Library. A beginning was made with the implementation of portal functionality with the development of subject oriented portal pages, where patrons will find a selection of bibliographies, core journals, reference works and selected websites. There was a need for these pages, since the list of ‘shortcuts’, was found to be too overwhelming for newcomers. However a guided selection system for the library resources failed to meet the requirements of these newcomers to help them with the selection of the right library resources to start their queries. These subject-oriented pages are XML pages generated by queries on our library catalogue. At this moment there are about 110 different subject oriented portal pages. In discussion with our customers the usefulness of these pages has always been stressed, especially for newcomers to the various specialities, but not for the researchers themselves Our second approach to the implementation of portal functionality was the possibility of personalization of library functions. ‘My library’. Personalization means in our case: selection of favourite bibliographies and databases; a virtual lending desk (services of renewals and tracking of reservations); alerts on new additions to the library catalogue and in house created bibliographies; Table of Content alerts for the majority of our journals; SDI alerts for end users on our Ovid/Silverplatter databases; and last but not least, in of May 2003 we introduced world wide access for our patrons to our collection of 4000 electronic journal and databases through EZproxy. This was a long anticipated advancement of the personalization functionality since Library Wageningen UR has a highly mobile internationally oriented client base. Currently about a third of our clientele has subscribed to the various ‘My library’ functionalities. To date we have not introduced ‘one search’ functionalities as they have become the fashion in library portals. Currently a team is working at the implementation of Metalib with SFX. This software will be integrated in the subject oriented portal pages. It is further envisioned that patrons, will be able to construct their own starting page where the customer oriented ‘myLibrary’ functionality will allow users to construct ‘myPortal’. In that case they can selected their favourite journals, reference works, websites etc… The backbone of all these functionalities is our library catalogue build on a Minisis system with custom build web interface based on open URL.