1. Scotland’s culture The cultural portal for Scotland Gordon Dunsire Centre for Digital Library Research Strathclyde University, Glasgow

2. Scotland’s Culture n Pilot development of a portal for accessing information about the culture of Scotland n Funded by the Scottish Executive, and launched by the Minister for Culture in October 2003 n Content creation (metadata) by Scottish Library and Information Council n Technical development by CDLR

3. Culture? n From shortbread, tartan, men-in-skirts, bagpipes … to opera, theatre, dance. n Social inclusion a principal factor u No disadvantage to Scottish citizens because of education, language, interests, and access barriers

4. Standards n International library standards applied u MARC21, AACR, LCNAF, LCSH n Software is Horizon Information Portal (Dynix) u XML and “open URL” n Allows searches to be specified in a URL u Name/value pairs for index, search term, etc.

5. LCSH vs “Scottish” n Use of LCSH for subject retrieval is a problem for social inclusion u Spellings are “wrong” (color vs colour) u Language is “wrong” (sidewalk vs pavement) u Structure is complicated for a casual user u Structure is incoherent for a sophisticated user

6. Solution! n Use the open URL facility to create pre-set searches u E.g. “BaseURL?index=sw&term=sidewalk” n Label the URL with local vocabulary u E.g. “Pavement” n Allows multiple labels for one search u Catering for different languages and terminology sets

7. Usage n Point-and-click searches n Structured text u Thesaurus n Graphical u Image, image map n Contextual u Cultural essay with embedded links

8. Demonstration Scotland’s Culture http://www.scotlandsculture.org/