Philip,

I knew you could be relied upon for a thought-provoking slant on the 
issues...  :-)

Incidentally, for those who aren't members of it, you can track a 
rather different kind of response emerging on the portals list, to 
which I also posted the original question
(http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A1=ind0311&L=portals)


> Well that people tend not to actually *use* portals is a pretty 
> important point. It suggests that the portal is a concept which is of 
> more obvious use to institutions than to users.

I'm not sure that people don't want to use *portals*, so much as that 
people don't want to use many of the current generation of portals, 
which appear as little more than an unpersonalised (and therefore 
depressingly wide-ranging and mostly off-topic) grab-bag of bits and 
bobs, odds and ends.

I'd have thought that users would actually quite *like* to use 
something which gathers relevant and interesting stuff together for 
them, without them having to do too much before it happens.

Of course, without an AWFUL lot more evidence, that's just my opinion.  
And we may be in real danger of over-hyping a technology before it's 
ready...

> The rights issues etc are issues mainly of concern to institutions 
> which want to run portal services - users for the most part would be 
> quite happy to go in through the front door of a service, if that is 
> the easiest and most practical way to access the resources.

Yes, users often are quite happy to go in through the front door of a 
service. If they know it exists. If they can find it. If they can 
navigate its (probably awful) interface. If they haven't already had to 
visit 3 other services in the course of gathering what they need. If 
they don't just give up on all this quality assured content stuff, and 
just Google it or plagiarise someone.

Portals don't make focussed, GOOD, services redundant. In many ways, 
they must be likely to *increase* usage; sometimes by people who go 
direct to a service they knew about before, or found out about through 
a portal, and sometimes in an m2m fashion, mediated by the user's 
portal of choice.

> ......
>
> <A larger part of the solution, though (and I've said this before), is
> <simply for an awful lot (not all) of the big 'national' portals to go
> <away. We don't need them. We (I, anyway) don't WANT them.
>
> The windmills won't go away just because someone takes a tilt. Part of 
> the problem with the portal concept is that it can be seen as a tool 
> for landgrabbing. Everybody who wants a piece of the action is bound 
> to set something up as long as portals are seen as a landgrabbing 
> tool.

All too true.  So we need to dissipate that perceived potential 
somehow. It's Z39.50 and OAI all over again. In each case a perfectly 
good tool was over-hyped to a ridiculous degree, and proposed as 'the 
answer' to some pretty ludicrous things.

Part of this will be getting large public sector organisations in 
various places to change direction, and *not* build themselves a 
one-stop shop entry ('portal') to everything that no one will ever use. 
  Existing work by the JISC and others on things like Shared Services 
points to part of the way forward, but we need much more work to see 
how some of these services actually work when delivered in a new 
context, via someone else's portal.

> < We *do*,
> <however, want their content. We *do* want their services. In some
> <cases, we also want the authority of their underlying brand. We simply
> <want all that delivered to us in our portal of choice, and our portal
> <of *choice* isn't necessarily theirs!  So - more work on the machine 
> to
> <machine, the Shared Services, the WSRP, the SOAP, the RSS
> <(appropriately formatted a la http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/miller/
> <of course!), the SRW, and much less of the budget on website and
> <marketing, please.
>
> This won't solve the problem, since the development money might not go 
> to the portal with the best technical services. This is because other 
> significant factors are in play (we lost the Betamax system, 
> remember).

There always are. That doesn't mean we can't try... and keep trying. As 
you say, though, it's not just about the technology. We need to work to 
change hearts and minds; we need to sell the portal to *users*, and we 
need to sell playing in other people's portals (with all due branding) 
to the *builders*, *content owners* and *policy setters*.

Paul

  -- dr. paul miller --------------------------- [log in to unmask] --
     project manager, portal project      www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/
     interoperability focus, ukoln     www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/
  ------------------------------------------- tel: +44 (0)1482 466890 --