Dr. Gretchen Whitney
School of Information Sciences
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Knoxville Area Health Sciences Librarians Meeting
11 October 2000
http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/medportals.html

Definitions

Portals. A portal is a site that echoes the Bee Gee's song, "I want to be your everything" - to provide you with major resources, links to important sites, news and current information, stock quotes, e-mail, chats, and other forms of interactivity. It wants to be the site that you start, and end, your day with.

The Webopedia defines a portal as "A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience." By its own definition, Webopedia itself could be construed as a portal!

WhatIs is a little more expansive. While it provides a definition similar to the above, it also suggests that a synonym is "gateway." It also points out that there are special-purpose portals: an ISP, for example AOL, may provide a portal for its users. There are also portals for niche industries: fool.com for investors, and garden.com for gardeners. It's a major starting point for users in general, or for those interested in a particular topic.

WhatIs also points to the issue of personalization: many portals are offering a "personalization" feature, in that you can customize the service to highlight your stocks, or your area's weather, or your newspapers.

In most cases, the driving force behind these activities is advertising. That is, the more reasons the site developer can give you to hang around the site, the more likely you are to stay a while and visit their advertisers.

Search Tools. A search engine or directory, however, is a tool that enables you to search a directory of sites in different subject areas or specialized subjects, or to search a database of sites that its spiders and robots have accumulated. This is its primary function, and it may not offer much else.

In today's environment, search tools often have added additional services making them more like portals, and, often portals have added (by design or by agreement) search tools. Which is which? It's a matter of emphasis and intent.

We must carefully distinguish between scholarly search tools, such as MEDLINE and EMBASE and ISI, and the Web-based search tools. The former use controlled-vocabulary techniques or citation relationships on the whole to establish a relationship between the user's query and the data available. The latter tend to use automated techniques to determine the relationship between the query and the data available, and may be trying to match two very general groups of information.

Advertising is also important for many search tools, however some of the better ones (such as Google) carry none.

Examples - General

Yahoo. Yahoo is a classic example of a search directory that has morphed into a Portal. It now offers not only the directory (in a more abbreviated format, it seems), but also links to news from a variety of sources, stock market information from Commodity Systems and Reuters, a classified advertising section (specific to Yahoo), and a wide variety of other kinds of shopping and related information. It also offers advertiser-supported e-mail, instant messaging, chat, electronic greeting cards, and clubs. Access to these services is free, but requires registration.

LinuxFool. The news service InfoToday called LinuxFool a portal, because it emphasizes interactive communication through a message board, forums, a web ring, as well as presenting basic tools. LinuxLinks is also trying to do the same thing - with a directory, e-mail, news, forums, and resources. In any given field, there's usually not a single place to start.

CygnusGraphics. This is an example of an industry-specific portal, that is trying to present current news and information for the graphics industry.

Mercantil.com. This is a regional portal, that is trying to provide the world's user with access to the Latin American business to business community.

Examples - Medical

QDPortal. QuickDOC is an e-mail format or standard, specific for ILL. KnowledgeFinder is a search support package (much like the old Pro-Search for DIALOG and BRS) that translates common terms in to MeSH terms. The QDPortal program is a piece of software for (apparently) Wintel machines that serves as a front end to DOCLINE, the NLM document delivery system. It can retrieve PubMed items by UID number or MEDLINE Identifier. It lets you place orders, and keep track of the status of them. It enables you to maintain a database of patrons and their contact information, for easy insertion into a record. It is now in "stage one" - a sort of advanced beta, because some functions are still carried out in the older version, such as non-DOCLINE requests. Further information can be found at the DOCLINE Survival Links site. The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) have created a Tutorial for its use.

QDPortal is using the word "portal" in another sense - as a front end to a particular task, to help you manage the task itself and surrounding information. It is similar to many other front ends used in libraries - OCLC services have their front ends, Pro-Search used to be a program to manage searches, and so forth.

The Australian Sports Commission, in assembling Topics in Sports, calls E-Fit Portal a "gateway," and so, in fact, do they. It is a searchable database of sites concerning health, fitness and nutrition. This is a part of a larger Web site that includes discussion boards, snippets from EFit TV (apparently it's a television station as well!), fitness calculators, various counseling programs and the like. In this case, the portal is not the front-end, it's a part of a larger Web site.

Healthline is a rather poorly designed offering from the Michigan Department of Community Health - but it is an example of how States are attempting to provide such portal services.

WebMD through Excite is offering its portal on health, with the usual access to e-mail and forums, calculators and advice. It is a guide, with interactivity.

Medicine.org is a consumer-oriented guide to medicine, with links to medical schools, medical libraries, job opportunities, vendors, associations, consumer and professional information, laboratories, news, and all sorts of information. Interactivity is provided through links to discussion groups, and a guestbook. Its search engine is unclear - but a search for "health" yielded its own resources in the first page of hits.

MedicineOnline is another consumer-oriented portal for medical information, but its primary focus is a "bid for surgery" feature, wherein you can attempt to set your own price for cosmetic procedures and the like. Sort of a medical "Priceline.com."

Neuronet calls itself the "Healthcare Portal for Neurological & Neuromuscular Disorders", and appears to be scholarly in nature. It offers books, research publications, supplies, and e-mail.

Greek Experts Portal: Health and Medicine is in English and Greek (hence the funny characters you get if you don't have the right font for Greek), and offers links to organizations and news articles. The Health and Medicine portion is part of a larger portal that offers experts and articles in a wide variety of topics. The site also offers auctions, and a free Business Center which is entirely in Greek.

Sociology of Health and Medicine Portal is offered by the University of Canterbury (NZ) library, and offers general reference materials in the subject, guides to classification numbers, citation style guides, statistics, and web resources. The library offers about 40 subject portals on various topics. It's using the term "portal" much as we would use the term "guide."

Portal to Medicine Magazines is a collection of Web sites of major medical magazines such as the New England Journal of Medicine, however why Adventures in Dining falls into this classification escapes me. It also points to general interest newspapers. While this site isn't very well done, it is another example of subject guides being called "portals."

Conclusions

The word "portal" is being used as a term to describe a wide variety of Web sites, from those that are provided by an ISP for its users (such as AOL) to those targeted at a specific product (such as Linux) to those targeted at a specific subject (such as health), and those users of a specific company's product (such as OCLC, or IBM, or Apple). The distinction here is the targeted user group - the user.

In the main, portals are distinguished from traditional bibliographic databases in that portals encourage the informal communication of information among user groups, whereas the traditional bibliographic databases rely on the scientific peer review system to establish a literature and provide access to it through scholarly-constructed databases and as a rule do not tolerate general user input. The distinction here is who can decide what information can be included in the information universe - the producer.

The line between portals and search tools on the Web is blurring, because search tools are adding communications elements, and portals are adding search dimensions. The distinction here is the conveyer of information - who is trying to reach a blend of the first two.

The use of the word "portal" today is one very similar to the use of the word "thesaurus" in the 1970s - everyone knew that they wanted to be more "up to date" than "subject heading list," which was deemed to be old-fashioned. So, all of the major databases claimed that they had a thesaurus. What they had in fact was everything from a subject heading list to a fully functional and mapped tool such as MeSH. Today "portal" has the same range of meanings - from a listing of links on a subject to an interface to a particular task to a full-blown community with the use of all communications technologies available, fully acknowledging the multiple platforms and languages of its potential users.