Access in a Networked World: Scholars Portal in Context

Since the 1960s, librarians have projected a vision of a digital library that offers seamless access to a vast world of scholarly information of all types. Until the 1990s, however, digital technologies lacked the power and capacity to deliver on the vision. During the 1990s, technology platforms, networking technologies, electronic resources, and the evolution of standards matured sufficiently to lay the foundation for the vision to be fulfilled. As this maturation was taking place, the rapid growth of electronic resources was based on numerous proprietary systems making access across such systems impossible. The scholars portal project is an effort to create a search and retrieval tool that will provide an interim solution to this problem until such time as those systems are built on a unified set of standards and data formats.