Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Portals in Libraries (27 Oct 2004) Web portals are seen as positive potential frameworks for achieving order out of chaos. As portals become a primary means for transacting information and commerce, libraries of all types are becoming involved in thinking, planning and building various frameworks and services that they call portals. For many library customers, if what they need is not on the Web, it does not exist. Increasingly, information is available from alternative Web sources, and libraries have to compete with a diversity of new information services. If information is difficult to find using library tools and services, customers are looking for alternative sources – if they even think of libraries at all. This new reality translates into the need for making library Web environments effective and useful. This trend is especially challenging for libraries, who were and continue to see themselves as the traditional keepers of knowledge, which until very recently was housed in many millions of books and journals that are rapidly becoming digitized. We see a growing acceptance in libraries of Web portals as a framework for work and for Web services, as a way of increasing access to collections, learning and work. Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-04/lakos_intro.html Read 113 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Postmortem: Nayantara's Star Chamber     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy