Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal December 2003 Volume 1 (6)

News feature

Scotland's portal

Stephen Winch describes the major new portal from SLIC and the Scottish Executive which gives easy access to resources on Scotland's rich culture.

SLIC, in partnership with the Scottish Executive, has launched a new web service that will provide access to electronic and print resources relating to Scottish culture. The service is still in a pilot phase, but has already developed an infrastructure that, it is hoped, will develop into a comprehensive gateway to Scottish cultural information.

In November 2002 the Scottish Executive commissioned SLIC to develop a cultural web portal for Scotland. The concept for the project developed from the Executive's report Creating our future... ...minding our past, which stated the Executive's vision for access for all to information and resources through electronic means. The report argued that culture in all its forms can stimulate and support lifelong learning, encourage community involvement and participation.

The pilot project to develop the portal runs for two years and aims to create a service that will:

• act as a one stop shop for information on Scottish cultural matters by acting as a gateway to information on a wide range of cultural resources, in print, audio visual and electronic formats.
• help support the development of cultural strategy and promote Scottish culture both locally and nationally.
• build on existing information networks such as CAIRNS (Co-operative Information Retrieval Network) and SCONE (Scottish Collections Network) to enhance the information landscape to include collection level resources and also printed resources.
• provide easy routes to the electronic resources of Scotland's Culture, by means of quick guides into subjects and also regional resources using an interactive map of Scotland and its regions and towns.

Key to the development of the pilot service was to build on existing information networks from the library, museum, archive communities and beyond. The library community has well developed information handling skills and the project was keen to use established standards to ensure quality information retrieval and to maximize interoperability. To this end, the project has made use of standards including: MARC 21, AACR2, Dewey and Library of Congress Subject headings. This has enabled the project to share metadata with other institutions and enabled the portal to accommodate other metadata formats such as Dublin Core.

The service contains a range of ways of accessing cultural information. At the basic level the user can search the service for websites about Scottish Culture catalogued by the portal team. For many this will be the primary use of the service and will provide access to all types of Scottish culture, ranging from the opera to fansites for local football teams. During the pilot, the main cataloguing focus has been on music, although a number of websites on literature and sport have also been added.

To add extra value to these resources a subject directory is being developed. Users can navigate down through a hierarchy of available subjects, in a similar way to the web directories that can be seen on Google and Yahoo. In addition users will be able to access resources by region through a clickable map that groups resources by place.

Scotland's Culture enables users to make use of CAIRNS and SCONE, which have been integrated into the service. CAIRNS allows users to search for print and electronic resources available from Scottish libraries at the same time as searching for electronic items in the Scotland's Culture catalogue. At present CAIRNS incorporates the National Library and mostly higher education libraries, but SLIC is intending to expand the service to include more libraries from the public and further education sectors.

SCONE provides access to collection level descriptions of print, physical and electronic resources available in Scotland. It contains descriptions of collections held by selected libraries, museums and web services. The service is also a source of up to date information of contact details for libraries and museums.

Scotland's Culture offers all of these services from a single URL and provides an infrastructure to draw together the output of Scotland's cultural community, whether established cultural institutions or individuals creating their own cultural websites. The service now launched provides a framework to build on and SLIC and the Scottish Executive are keen for other cultural institutions to become involved with the portal project. Over the coming year the project team will be looking at expanding the CAIRNS service to include all Scottish libraries and other databases of cultural significance. The team are also looking to increase the number of collection descriptions available through SCONE and to increase the number of resources catalogued in the main Scotland's Culture database. The project is always interested to hear from organisations that may be able to help and feel that by contributing organisations will be promoting their own cultural output to the rest of Scotland and the wider world.

Stephen Winch is Portals Development Officer, Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) (Slic4@slainte.org.uk).

Further information:

Scottish Library & Information Council (SLIC) www.slainte.org.uk/

Scottish Executive www.scotland.gov.uk/

Scotland's Culture www.scotlandsculture.org/

Creating our future... ...Minding our past www.scotland.gov.uk/ nationalculturalstrate gy/docs/cult-00.asp

Information Scotland Vol.1 (6) December 2003

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