A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information ; often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.
This page is a glossary of library and information science.
Copac was a union catalogue which provided free access to the merged online catalogues of many major research libraries and specialist libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland, plus the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales. It had over 40 million records from around 90 libraries as of 2019, representing a wide range of materials across all subject areas. Copac was freely available to all, and was widely used, with users mainly coming from Higher Education institutions in the United Kingdom, but also worldwide. Copac was valued by users as a research tool.
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector.
HyTelnet was an early attempt to create a universal or at least simpler interface for the various Telnet-based information resources available before the World Wide Web. It was first developed in 1990 by Peter Scott, then at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. Using a client written by Earl Fogel, HyTelnet offered its users a primitive terminal-based GUI that allowed them to browse a directory of Telnet-based resources and then access them in a relatively standardized manner. On-line help was available, and there were frequent updates made available to its database which sites could download.
Mimas was a nationally designated academic data centre based at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Its mission was to support the advancement of knowledge, research, and teaching. It hosted a number of the UK's research information assets – and built applications to help people access this resource. The organisation had a long-standing relationship with Jisc, and strong connections with research councils, especially the Economic and Social Research Council. Mimas was transferred to Jisc in August 2014.
The UK Data Archive is a national centre of expertise in data archiving in the United Kingdom (UK). It houses the largest collection of social sciences and population digital data in the UK. It is certified under CoreTrustSeal as a trusted digital repository. It is also certified under the international ISO 27001 standard for information security. Located in Colchester, the UK Data Archive is a specialist department of the University of Essex, co-located with the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER). It is primarily funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the University of Essex.
Learning on Screen - The British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) is a representative body promoting the production, study and use of moving image, sound and related media for learning and research. It is a company limited by guarantee, with charity status, serving schools, colleges and post compulsory education interests in the UK.
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an open access digital archive for archaeological research outputs. It is located in The King's Manor, at the University of York. Originally intended to curate digital outputs from archaeological researchers based in the UK's Higher Education sector, the ADS also holds archive material created under the auspices of national and local government as well as in the commercial archaeology sector. The ADS carries out research, most of which focuses on resource discovery, cross-searching and interoperability with other relevant archives in the UK, Europe and the United States of America.
The Faculty Of Science is one of the four faculties which make up the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. The faculty contains a number of departments offering various undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
The UK educational evidence portal (eep) is an online resource providing easy access to published research and evidence-based guidance across all areas of education, and related aspects of children’s services. It was developed through collaboration between organisations to make research evidence more widely available to a range of audiences, including educational professionals, practitioners, policy makers and the research community.
The JISC Digitisation Programme was a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural memory organizations in the United Kingdom, from 2004 to 2010 The program was managed by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.
SWORD is an interoperability standard that allows digital repositories to accept the deposit of content from multiple sources in different formats via a standardized protocol. In the same way that the HTTP protocol allows any web browser to talk to any web server, so SWORD allows clients to talk to repository servers. SWORD is a profile (specialism) of the Atom Publishing Protocol, but restricts itself solely to the scope of depositing resources into scholarly systems.
A library consortium is any cooperative association of libraries that coordinates resources and/or activities on behalf of its members, whether they are school, public, academic, special libraries, and/or information centers. Consortia exist on a variety of levels, e.g., local, state, regional, national or international. Libraries commonly belong to multiple consortia. The goal of a library consortium is to amplify the capabilities and effectiveness of its member libraries through collective action, including, but not limited to, print or electronic resource sharing, reductions in costs through group purchases of resources, and professional development opportunities. The “bedrock principle upon which consortia operate is that libraries can accomplish more together than alone.”
Landmap was a service based at the University of Manchester, England, which provided UK academia with a free-of-charge spatial data download service, using Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards for maximum interoperability, which was enhanced and supported by a range of teaching and learning materials. The service was hosted at the Mimas datacentre from 2007 until 2013, and was funded by the government via Jisc.
Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) project was started in August 1995 and the core database went live in September 1996. Its objective was to provide a free guide to specialist engineering resources to UK higher education institutions. It focused primarily on UK based resources. It was part of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) which was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) The main team was based at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, with additional input from staff at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College, Cambridge University, Nottingham Trent University, Sheffield University, Cranfield University and the IEE.
CORE is a service provided by the Knowledge Media Institute based at The Open University, United Kingdom. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and open access journals, enrich this content using text mining and data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. CORE works closely with digital libraries and institutional repositories.
OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories is a UK-based website that lists open access repositories. It is searchable by locale, content, and other measures. The service does not require complete repository details and does not search repositories' metadata.
Open access to scholarly communication in South Africa occurs online via journals, repositories, and a variety of other tools and platforms. Compared to other African nations, open access in South Africa has grown quickly in recent years.
