PLEASE NOTE: The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) is no longer being developed, and has been supplanted by CWIS, a free and open source software package that offers all of the features of SPT and more. Please see the CWIS project area for more information.

For a resource portal site to be worthwhile it has to provide significant functionality for the average user looking to locate or learn about valuable online resources. The Portal Toolkit provides a number of site features intended to meet this need.

Cross-Field Searching - A wide variety of metadata may be used to describe a resource. This feature allows users to search across all appropriate fields for a given set of keywords, or to search for resources that only contain (or do not contain) specific terms in specific fields.

Resource Annotations by Users - Portal users can add their own comments about an individual resource. This facility adds value to the resource entries and encourages interaction within the user community. It also allows portal developers to leverage off of their user community to increase the value of the collection, benefitting all concerned.

Intelligent User Agents - This feature allows portal users to specify a set of criteria for resources that fit their interests and then be automatically notified when new resources become available that fit that criteria.

Resource Quality Ratings by Users - This provides a systematic means through which users can share their evaluations of resources, allowing other users to view the resources with the highest rankings. In addition, through this mechanism portal developers can gather aggregate feedback on the resource entries or areas within their collection and resource developers can better assess the strong points of their work and how it compares to other similar resources within their discipline.

Suggested Resource Referrals (Recommender System) - By evaluating ratings and other information entered by users, this feature allows the portal to recommend other resources that may be of interest to a user.

In addition to these features, portals built with the Scout Portal Toolkit are insured to be accessible to users with disabilities (and in compliance with government and university accessibility regulations) because the Toolkit complies with the guidelines specified by the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The bottleneck in building a high-quality collection of discipline-specific resource entries is very often the time available from the experts in that discipline. To maximize the productivity of that time the Scout Portal Toolkit provides the Intelligent Metadata Tool.

The Intelligent Metadata Tool (IMT) is a web-based tool for the entry and editing of resource information. Although only accessible to portal site administrators and designated users, the IMT is an integrated part of the portal site, providing ready access to portal facilities and information collected by the portal for discipline experts while they are working on resource entries.

Features of the IMT that aid the resource collection developer in building and maintaining resource entries include user-selectable field presets, which allow a developer to define or specify a value once and then have the IMT automatically fill in that value as appropriate, drop-down menus for metadata fields, which speed the entry of commonly-used values and help keep the metadata vocabulary consistent, and context-sensitive help, which can help bring new resource collection contributors up to speed with a minimum investment of time on the part of the portal builder or other resource collection developers.

Usability and accessibility are important to more than just the portal end-user. Portal developers' time and energy are better spent creating and assembling content than tinkering with software, and many organizations otherwise ideally equipped to build high-quality portals do not have web or database software experts readily available, so ease of setup and configuration are crucial attributes for portal software components.

The first step in using a new software package is installing it on your computer (or, in this case, on a web server). To make that step as painless as possible, the Scout Portal Toolkit is packaged in standard tar/gzip format and installed with a single command. In most cases you will literally have the SPT installed and running in less than five minutes.

Although the default settings on a newly-installed Portal Toolkit will be optimized to allow a portal builder to set up a useful portal site with a minimum of effort, there will still be some aspects that the builder will need or want to configure themselves. To allow the non-technical builder to perform this task the Toolkit includes a web-based configuration tool that does not require any knowledge of HTML, Unix, or other behind-the-scenes technical details.