Digital research tools in higher education

Institutions of higher education traditionally occupy themselves with teaching an established corpus of wisdom to the next generation, and in the process of doing so produce and manage vast quantities of information. They have benefited immeasurably from information and communication technology (ICT), which allows them to manage their enormous resources better, while their administration and teaching have been transformed by new digital tools. However, some faculties have taken advantage of the revolution more than others. For universities research is big business. Those who can stay ahead of the innovation curve stand to benefit immensely. The fields of science and engineering stand out, both competing with and collaborating with commercial and governmental research and development projects for the latest applications of information and computer technology. Their research culture is attuned to collaborative working and large sets of raw data. The internet and the world wide web are themselves the product of disciplinary needs within these sectors, and many of the rapidly developing e-science or grid computing programmes have been under way in the science and engineering field for over a decade.

Portal technology quickly became a useful strategy for managing the vast array of information becoming available through the internet on the world wide web. As a tool something akin to the Swiss army knife, portals offered to do many things for the user, but with none of them dedicated to a single task. The work of portals has evolved from what might be termed ‘thin’ portals (also called gateways or hubs), which contain pages of links or web-searching tools, to ‘thick’ portals, which rely on grid technologies to aggregate many forms of data into a single, personalized interface, facilitating communication and collaboration by using high speed data transfers and alerting services. Portal technologies sit atop the complex network architecture supplied by grid computing and web services, and provide a simple entry-point into a range of networked computational tools. This convergence of portals and grid computing is beginning to shape various new initiatives throughout the higher education sector known as ‘e-research’.