New Portal Technologies

MATRIX is currently researching methods for integrating portals into the infrastructure of digital libraries. Traditional searches offered by digital libraries deliver single objects to users based on their search criteria. Users have to click on, view, and analyze each return to decide whether the object is of interest, so that gathering multiple objects on any one topic can be time consuming and frustrating. In contrast, new portal technologies should interpret the search for users in conjunction with the return object they select and automatically find related digital objects. This would transform a single digital object into a complex digital object, an object contextualized and composed of multiple digital objects. MATRIX will build upon this research to test cross-repository portals that would display digital objects from other repositories that corresponded to items found by a user. Thus, over time, the digital archive will begin to anticipate user needs and interoperate with other digital repositories.