Scholarly Portals: Serving the International Research Community: Experiences and Challenges

Monday, 8 March 2004
Tilburg University Library, the Netherlands

Background
Libraries and other information service providers are facing increasing pressure to provide cost-effective and complex information services in a world of abundant, diverse and often unfiltered information of different format, quality and location. There is an increasing need for knowledge transfer between key information providers across libraries and borders to meet the challenges. Formal regional library networks already promote such co-operation; as do both international and national consortia which are helping even further to collectively share resources, storage facilities, technology systems and knowledge, and provide new e-resource purchasing models.

A number of international digital library projects are taking on new challenges in organising and disseminating subject-specific information in a more targeted way in order to serve the needs of the increasingly mobile academic, researcher, or student. These projects acknowledge that such users need their information to be accessible in both a narrower way (i.e. it should be subject-based and relevant to their specific needs) and more widely (i.e. it should cross geographical and national boundaries in order to be comprehensive in the specific field). There is a parallel trend in the publishing world, where subject-oriented collections and services are mushrooming.

Some of the international projects are under development and some have come to a close and need to make the transition from project to sustained service. Although the research communities targeted by the projects differ, their goals and information management challenges are largely similar. The time seems right now to hold an exchange of experience event between these projects. This workshop therefore proposes to bring together the key drivers behind such projects for increased knowledge exchange in order to maximise on knowledge and efficiency, and to look towards setting up co-operative standards and initiatives in the future.

Goal
The goal of this workshop was to exchange experiences in developing subject-specific portals with key actors for new insights into best practices regarding the provision of effective information services.

The Nereus Roundtable Workshop endeavoured to promote peers from projects such as EULER, RENARDUS, NEREUS, SOSIG, Subject Portals Project and TEL to exchange experiences, challenges and solutions related to various topics of common interest. Workshops answered questions relating to the importance of international co-operation in terms of providing excellent information services to the scholar and how it can help increase efficiency in libraries. How far do technological choices have a significant influence on the success factor of an information service? Are we well prepared for sustaining such initiatives? These issues were addressed.

Results
Knowledge was gained on the challenges and solutions of some of Europe’s key international subject-portal projects, and generally unanimous conclusions were made. This is documented in the form of a summary, which has resulted from the Workshop.