University Library Portal: A Tool for Web-Enabled Information Services

Background

Web portals became a buzz word in the digital era. It is one of the most popular topics of discussion in technology today. A web portal plays a specialized role in the digital world (Sharma & Gupta, 2005). Web-portals are meta-resources that function as a gateway or point of access to information. Portals gather a variety of useful information resources at one place called a “one-stop” webpage where users can customize their information sources by selecting and viewing information they find personally useful. The term ‘portal’ describes a variety of web-based interfaces called a dynamic one-stop homepage where users can customize the content to meet their needs. The web portal is a site that functions as a point of access to information on the web (Mane & Pange, 2015). The term portal derives from the Latin word ‘portale’ which means door, gate. The web portal originated from web search engines and evolved through web push technology. Portals were so popular in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumers (B2C) applications (Zhou, 2003). After the proliferation of web browsers in the late 1990s, many companies tried to build portal to have Internet market. Web portal refers to only the website that can be customized by individual users. The ‘My trend’ emerged and dominated the Internet platform since the late 1990s. Most of the well-known internet companies such as Yahoo, Lycos, AOL and even the state of California web sites started using My-Trend in portals. The ‘portal’ term entered into the world of education.