The Knowledge Portal, or, the Vision of Easy Access to Information

Purpose: The development of the 'Knowledge Portal' is the attempt to develop a central access system in terms of a 'single point of access' for all electronic information services. This means that all these sources - from the library's catalogue and full-text in-house applications to external, licensed sources - should be accessible via one central Web service. Design/methodology/approach: The Knowledge Portal is a piece of software and a real library application, based on Primo, a commercial product, which has been enhanced through a cooperative project from ETH Libraries (Libraries of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and ExLibris. The new portal will be the result of integrating this new metasearch and the library's homepage. Findings: The paper gives an overview of the general idea behind this complex and clearly user-oriented project and shows which steps are necessary for its launch. Originality / value: The paper gives an example of how to organize cooperation between quite different project partners and shows the complexity of setting up a portal as the single point of access

The Knowledge Portal, or, the Vision of Easy Access to Information

Purpose: The development of the 'Knowledge Portal' is the attempt to develop a central access system in terms of a 'single point of access' for all electronic information services. This means that all these sources - from the library's catalogue and full-text in-house applications to external, licensed sources - should be accessible via one central Web service. Design/methodology/approach: The Knowledge Portal is a piece of software and a real library application, based on Primo, a commercial product, which has been enhanced through a cooperative project from ETH Libraries (Libraries of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) and ExLibris. The new portal will be the result of integrating this new metasearch and the library's homepage. Findings: The paper gives an overview of the general idea behind this complex and clearly user-oriented project and shows which steps are necessary for its launch. Originality / value: The paper gives an example of how to organize cooperation between quite different project partners and shows the complexity of setting up a portal as the single point of access

The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain

The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals

Access in a Networked World: Scholars Portal in Context

published or submitted for publicatio