Opening the PORTAL to Better Relationships.

This article describes the efforts of Connelly Library at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to integrate its services into the portal that the university implemented for the entire campus as of February 2005. Since the summer of 2004, the author has been working with Jim Sell, director of portal communications at the library, on finding more ways to take advantage of this technology. La Salle is a small, urban university in Philadelphia with a full-time enrollment of approximately 4,500 students. Although the full-time students are mainly residential, the need to provide resources to remote users is growing. The resident students live in fully wired dorms. Connelly Library, with a staff of nine full-time librarians, is the only library serving the La Salle community. Among the author's duties as the media services librarian is designing and maintaining the library's Web site. The author relates that although he designs the site to be as clear and accessible as possible, it contains a broad range of information, and not all of it is appropriate to every patron. Ideally, a portal shows each user only the information that is relevant to him or her, without the user even being aware that many other doors exist. The library decided this was the way it would like to offer its services to its diverse population. INSET: Three Keys to Opening a Portal Successfully.