Integrated access to the resources of libraries, archives, museums and art galleries is the goal of the Western Australian Cultural Heritage Portal. Launched in April 2005, the portal enables researchers, students and the community to perform a Google-type search of the holdings of major cultural heritage institutions in Australia's biggest state.
The portal was established with the aid of a grant from the Australian Research Council's Linkage - Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities - programme. It is hosted by the University of Western Australia, with Curtin University of Technology and the Western Australian Department for Culture and the Arts as major development partners.
The software solution used for the portal is ZPortal, from OCLC PICA. ZPortal has also been used very successfully for community access portals in the U.K., and for the Scholar's Portal project in North American research libraries.
The portal is an exciting new way to bring together a state's cultural heritage resources, regardless of the different types of institutions which hold them. The portal makes it much easier to identify and locate Western Australian heritage materials, and makes them much more visible to the people of Western Australia.
The Western Australian Cultural Heritage Portal is freely available at: http://chp.library.uwa.edu.au/
For more information, contact the Project Director: Dr Toby Burrows in the Scholars' Centre.
