Mary E. Jackson
Senior Program Officer for Access Services
Association of Research Libraries
Just over a year ago, ARL established a Scholars Portal Working Group with the goal of defining and promoting tools and services for the academic community that provide a single point of access on the Web to find high-quality information resources and, to the greatest extent possible, to deliver the information and services directly to the user’s desktop. A User Scenario was developed and an environmental scan conducted to determine the availability of software tools and of opportunities for collaboration to pursue the vision of the group. In addition, ARL conducted a survey to determine the state of portal functionality that is currently deployed or being considered by research libraries. This briefing session will bring the audience up to date on ARL’s findings and next steps.
Information on the ARL Scholars Portal initiative is available on the ARL web site <http://www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/>