A comparison of academic information portals

Abstract

In Germany, there are a great number of portals. The academic information portal vascoda covers about 40 individual subject portals in many different fields. A study was conducted in 2007 to find out if and how these portals serve the needs of their target groups. In a first step, researchers were asked about their specific needs and wishes.1 In addition, the contents and search functions of several portals were evaluated. The major findings of this study and previous studies will be presented in this paper. Vascoda is an interdisciplinary academic information portal. It started its services in 2003, and it was first based on meta-search-technology. Since the relaunch in November 2007, new search engine technology (FAST) searches in over 100 million datasets from over 100 databases of different providers. The search engine focuses exclusively on academic and scholarly contents. The German Research Foundation (DFG) initialized the creation of Virtual Libraries (ViFa) in 1998. Since then more than 30 Virtual Libraries were created at the special collections libraries and other institutions. The Virtual Libraries and other subject portals funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research can be accessed through vascoda. In 2008 there are about 40 subject portals for many different subjects from Anglo-American Culture to Veterinary Medicine. The subject portals offer access to all kinds of information from specific databases to library catalogues and from internet resources to electronic journals. Most of the virtual libraries still offer a meta-search of different databases, they include different document supply services and a couple of other services. Typical