Tools for creating your own resource portal : Cwis and the scout portal toolkit
Edward Almasy · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2005
Creating a full-featured resource portal on the Web is no small task, and it can be even more of a challenge without a team of Web designers and programmers. In the fall of 2000 the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Internet Scout Project (Scout) received funding from the Mellon Foundation to build an open-source software package intended to enable collection developers to share their collection’s metadata via the Web. In October of 2002 Scout began a new effort, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) initiative, to build upon prior work and create a software package that would help STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Math) content authors and collection developers share their work online and integrate it into NSDL. The software packages resulting from these two projects, the Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) and the Collection Workflow Integration System (CWIS), are very inexpensive to maintain and operate and easy for nontechnical staff to download, set up, and populate with metadata. Conforming to international standards for metadata, data harvesting, and Web technology makes SPT and CWIS useful for and usable by a wide variety of projects and organizations, allowing and encouraging collaboration and record sharing among projects. In today’s Internet, with information overload prevalent even within a single discipline, scholars and researchers struggle to find the precise material they need in the tangled web of online information. The major search engines do not offer great precision or any guarantee of authority;