Scout Portal Toolkit For Web/Database Legal Material 2004 CONFERENCE FOR LAW SCHOOL COMPUTING

Introduction Making useful information available on the Internet more accessible for law students without expensive software and without significant expertise in web page creation or database design

Agenda The Idea The First Solution - Filamentality The Second Solution - Microsoft Word The Third Solution - Microsoft FrontPage Fourth Solution – Microsoft FrontPage and Access The Fifth Solution - Scout Portal Toolkit Other Solutions

Overview My idea was that law students, lawyers, and others researching the law could find valuable assistance in doing their research if they could easily find various pathfinders and annotated bibliographies created at many American law schools.

First Solution - Filamentality Lacked any skill building web pages Lacked an ISP to post my web pages Found a tool that seemed to offer me some help on the Internet requiring no expertise and costing nothing Offered by Pacific Bell Telephone Company now SBC Communications for school teachers The web product is Filamentality

First Solution - Filamentality The problem with Filamentality is that it did not have very much functionality.

Second Solution – Microsoft Word In order to create an alphabetic list I used Microsoft Word. Allowed creation of a web page from a Word file Then I used a student assistant to improve the layout.

Second Solution – Microsoft Word Problem creating detailed subject listing with Word Difficult to keep up entries for up to a thousand or more pathfinders on one page

Third Solution – Microsoft FrontPage Work in Microsoft FrontPage Eliminate problems with porting pages from Word

Fourth Solution – Microsoft FrontPage and Access Learn Microsoft Access and create an Access database and link it to FrontPage web pages to create dynamic web pages

Fourth Solution – Microsoft FrontPage and Access Decided this solution would require too much time to learn Lacked confidence in my ability to pull it off

Fifth Solution - Scout Portal Toolkit Solution A low cost open source solution that offers sophisticated database software. A web interface designed for librarians and subject specialists who lack database and web page creation expertise. It allows the creation of a subject portal.

Fifth Solution - Scout Portal Toolkit Software comes from the Internet Scout Project at the University of Wisconsin Funded by a Mellon Foundation Grant

Scout Portal Toolkit Solution The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) allows anyone or group that has information resources they want to share via the Internet to make that information available through the use of dynamic web pages. The investment of time and money is small.

Scout Portal Toolkit Solution The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) offers a number of features that would be hard to duplicate at low cost. If one uses a number of fields they all can be searched in fairly sophisticated ways. One can allow users to propose comments to enrich the individual records or add records.

Scout Portal Toolkit Solution Users can create a current awareness service to tell them when new resources of interest are added. Users can rate individual records for their value. The developer tools are sophisticated but simple for the subject specialist to use. One can create a classified subject index which can supplement the other search capabilities.

Scout Portal Toolkit Solution What you need to use Scout Portal Toolkit. A web server with Apache server software, PHP and MySQL 3.23 or later. Linux is the operating system being used.

Scout Portal Toolkit Solution Support from Internet Scout Project is limited to an announcement list, a discussion list, and some assistance. Periodic upgrades and bug fixes are available. There have been three upgrades in the past year to improve performance and functionality.

Summary Scout Portal Toolkit is a low cost method to create a sophisticated Internet accessible database of information sources. It is useful for the subject expert who has little time, interest, and money for database development and web page construction. Other users of the Scout Portal Toolkit

Where to Get More Information An Article in D-Lib Magazine sy/11almasy.html An American Library Association presentation PowerPoint at the Law Scout Toolkit web site hp

Other Solutions SWISH-E ResearchGuide from the University of Michigan html MyLibrary