Portal Combat

The idea behind a portal site is that you, the user, will adopt it as your "home base" for further Web explorations. When the typical user downloads and launches Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer, the first page to come up on screen is the Netscape (www.netscape.com) or Microsoft (www.msn.com) portal page. It's a page with links to search tools, news, and, of course, e-commerce: sites selling books, stocks, cars, and anything else that can be sold online. In Web parlance, portals aim to be "sticky," offering links to enough cool content to make you want to come back regularly.

Many people never change the standard Netscape or Microsoft portal page to one that might meet their needs better--although it's easy to do--and that's something both companies count on. But there are plenty of alternatives. Over the past year, the number of education and library portals has grown phenomenally. Let's look at a few of them--of the hundred-plus out there--selected for usefulness and variety.

Ednow.com is an education portal put up by Sagebrush Corporation, which owns both Winnebago Spectrum and Athena library automation systems, as well as Econo-Clad. Although Ednow is targeted at the entire K-12 education community, its library roots show on the home page, where you can select from "Teacher," "Librarian," or "Administrator" views--and when you visit in the future, the site remembers which you selected. The "Librarian" page features publishing and education news, book reviews, and a public and school library of the week.

Lisnews.com (library and information science news) is a rather nice, if relatively homespun, news site for librarians created and maintained by Blake Carver and Steve Galbraith, who call themselves "a couple of librarians from Buffalo, NY." True to its name, the site focuses on news relating to the world of libraries, particularly public and academic libraries. There's also a regular poll on a library-related issue. Other (and slicker) library portals include LibraryHQ.com and LibrarySpot.com. LibraryHQ includes a number of useful automation-oriented resources, such as a sample RFP (request for proposal).

The Microsoft Classroom Teacher Network (MCTN) (www.microsoft.com/education/mctn/default.asp) targets all K-12 teachers (there is no "librarian" section, unfortunately) with online discussions, a "Community Forum" that features interviews with educators on topics such as Internet safety and professional development, and lesson plans featuring Microsoft software. MCTN offers a nice overview of the use of laptops in the classroom (one of Bill Gates's education priorities) and teacher-oriented tutorials for Access, FrontPage, and other MS products.

Scholastic's Teacher's Homepage (teacher.scholastic.com) features interviews with Scholastic authors, lesson plans based around its books, and "links to hundreds of teacher-approved safe sites." (We see the word "safe" a lot on the big commercial education sites. Would Scholastic even consider linking to a site that wasn't "safe"?)

SurfMonkey.com is a portal aimed at kids. The site says it's "the trusted, friendly, cyberspace guide and companion that safely helps kids meet, learn, play, shop, and explore online." It provides "safe" (in this case, the word means "filtered") browsing tools that parents can install on a browser their children are using, and offers a selection of cool and worthwhile sites, big libraries of games and animations, and a bulletin board. Adults who want kids to use a more educational portal should consider bigchalk.com's HomeworkCentral.com, from the company that brings us Electric Library and ProQuest.

But if you're a librarian or media specialist, none of these sites should be the featured portal on your PCs. Your users should first see your library or media center home page--a page designed to serve as a gateway to everything your students need to find. Uncertain about how to put together such a page? Check back next month.