Introduction

All portals seek to integrate information access within a single framework, but different types of portals focus on different information resources, different types of services or different groups of users with varying needs and areas of interest. Within any one organization, there may be a need for several portal-type applications in order to address the full range of user needs. Even an organization that has successfully implemented a corporate or enterprise information portal providing broad, horizontal services to a wide range of corporate, financial, personnel, customer and administrative information may still require ‘a specialized applicationspecific vertical portal’ (Gourley, 2003) to provide richer and more focused services in the areas of bibliographic and library information. These specific and specialized needs are those that the library portal seeks to address.

Various formal definitions of a library portal have been put forward by different groups (Library of Congress, 2003; European Library Automation Group, 2002; ARL Scholars’ Portal Working Group, 2001; Cox and Yeates, 2003, in a report for JISC). Ignoring differences in perspective and emphasis, these different definitions can be summarized as follows:

Services offered by a library portal

Resource discovery