No. 169, October 2009

PORTA has been renewed

On July 7, 2009 the National Diet Library Digital Archive Portal (PORTA) was renewed.

PORTA is a national digital portal site which navigates users to digital archives: it guides them comprehensively to the digital contents of other cooperating institutions in addition to NDL's contents. As of the end of June, 41 kinds of digital archives are available through PORTA.

Improvement and new functions are as follows:

• Search response can be obtained more rapidly.
• List of search results is more user-friendly.

• Primary information (contents itself) is displayed first.
• Search results can be sorted by institutions which provide contents, Nippon Decimal Classification (NDC), year of publication, etc.
• Icons help to display results more clearly. For example, users can see whether a content found in the search results is primary information or secondary information (bibliographic data only).

• Bookmark function by which users can add comments and share them is now easier to use.

• Users can view bookmarks without user registration.
• Details of search results can be registered easily on social bookmarks.

Icons from the left:
types of resources (texts, images, moving images, etc.)
digitized or not
availability from the Internet or not
charged or not
This example shows that it is a digitized material, included in the Rare Book Image Database of
NDL and can be read and downloaded free.

Related article: NDL Newsletter No.158
(http://www.ndl.go.jp/en/publication/ndl_newsletter/158/581.html)

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