Research Portals in Arts and Humanities

A User Analysis Project

Quick links:

• Introduction
  • Project background
  • Timetable
• Methodology
  • Mapping the domain
  • Collating service provider data
  • Collecting practitioner data
  • Evaluating portal designs
• Contacts
• Delphi forecasting
• Project final report
• Interim project reports
• Portlet demonstrator

The RePAH final report concluded that arts and humanities researchers would find most useful a managed research environment that offers:

• Workflow Management tools that give the researcher greater personal control over digital project resources, especially more evolved bookmarking features and some form of automated copyright management system to facilitate the growing concern with usage permission and intellectual property rights was also highly valued.
• Resource Discovery tools that provide greater control over web-based resources including the ability to filter the quality of hit returns, search multiple databases
• News feed features that by-pass personal email accounts, but notify users of conferences, funding, jobs and new research publications.
• Collaborative research tools for social bookmarking, uploading and sharing resources, annotating digital resources, shared document editing, attaching metadata to personally-created digital resources, and contributing to the authentication of digital content.

Rather than a single monolithic research portal, it recommended the development of interoperable portlets that can be used to embed portal type functionality in institutional and community web sites. To illustrate how this might work we have created a demonstrator that shows how a researcher can add selected research tools to their personal research portal page at their own institution and use these to carry out workflow based, collaborative, research.

To see a demonstration of how portals could be used for research purposes, please click link Portlet demonstrator.

Personnel and Contact Details

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