Looking for the virtual service station

1999 was an eventful year for the UK higher education information sector. Engineering, my own particular area of interest, saw many important developments. As a result of various CHEST (Combined Higher Education Software Team) agreements, access to the Ei Compendex and Ei Page One databases was moved from the BIDS bibliographic service to EDINA, the JISC-designated Dataset Centre at the University of Edinburgh; site licences for INSPEC became available through a number of different service providers; the ISI Web of Science became available through MIMAS (Manchester Information and Associated Services); and the Complete Cambridge Sciences Collection also became available. Among other significant engineering information products in the news were the ACM Digital Library, Anbar Electronic Intelligence databases, the IEEE/IEE Electronics Library (IEL) and NTIS. Throughout the year there were important additions to a number of ejournal services, while use of the traditional online hosts by academic information professionals continued to decline. More effective access to high-quality Internet resources for the UK learning and research communities came several steps closer to reality with the launch of the RDN (Resource Discovery Network). Some search engines attempted to index 200 million Web sites.

Keeping up to date with all of these developments is becoming increasingly problematic and is causing plenty of extra effort in terms of new documentation, changed web page links, and training/retraining.

So, what about the light I mentioned at the end of the tunnel? I believe that the new Dialog Portals, with their coordinated aggregation of various databases, have shown the way for future access to electronic information by subject. Though configurable, however, the Dialog Portals are not perfect portals. Their US emphasis makes them less relevant to those of us in other countries. Their range of deliverable information types, which includes scholarly papers, trade literature, dissertations and standards, is impressive, but does not encompass all of the information landscape, or local and intranet services. Lastly, they are dependent on individual credit-card transactions and do not incorporate access via organisational or pan-institutional authentication services.

What is needed are 'white knights' in the form of all-encompassing subject portals that can make up for the deficiencies of existing portals and virtual one-stop-shops. I believe that competition and the effort required will prevent any one publisher, online host, information supplier or commercial service from succeeding in the creation of such beasts, and that they will take considerable and concerted effort to produce. Once developed, however, for hard-pressed subject specialists like myself, and especially for end-users of information, they will almost certainly become the equivalent of the virtual service station.

Roddy MacLeod is Senior Faculty Librarian at Heriot-Watt University, and editor of the Internet Resources Newsletter

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