Building an e-Science Portal for Librarians: A Model of Collaboration

The e-Science Portal for New England Librarians (http://esciencelibrary.umassmed.edu) is an openly accessible website targeted specifically for librarians working in research institutions that generate, share, store and/or use data for basic scientific research in the health, biological, and physical sciences. The portal provides links to information on e-Science, e-Science librarianship, current practices, and science disciplines. The portal’s e-Science Community blog http://esciencecommunity.umassmed.edu serves as a bulletin and discussion forum for the latest news, upcoming events, and commentaries. While the portal was originally developed to provide e-Science information to New England Librarians, its openly accessible content is relevant to librarians interested in networked science worldwide. Content for the e-Science Portal for New England Librarians is contributed by a team of nine content editors who are science and medical librarians from diverse New England research libraries. Each content editor identifies, annotates, and aggregates links to resources for a designated focus area of the portal and submits them to the portal’s project coordinator for further review. Following this review, the project coordinator and the portal development team plan the organization and layout of the content in the relevant subject web pages of the portal. The effective collaboration among the content editors and the portal design team has been crucial to the development of an e-Science Portal that provides the essential resources and tools needed by librarians engaging in networked science. The focus of this paper is the model of collaboration adopted by the portal’s design team and content editors.