An ‘ILRT alumni and friends’ group has sprung up on Facebook, with several dozen members. We reminisce about events we attended and projects we worked on, and share photos of former staff jollies and awaydays, conference visits, giveaway items and so on. Many of us had something to do with the resource discovery site Intute (I still have an Intute plastic drinks coaster). It covered all subjects and subsumed ILRT’s own SOSIG (Social Services Information Gateway). As well as cross-searching, Intute also had add-ons such as newsfeeds and a personalised space for tagging and exporting content. It ran from 2006 until 2011, with content frozen till 2014, when the site was finally closed.

(Earlier when I worked at NISS – now Eduserv which has been in the news this week – we had a ‘Directory of Networked Resources’, which also covered all subjects. As well as cataloguing all resources on the NISS site, anyone could catalogue and submit a resource. It ceased to work in about 2002, I believe because there wasn’t the staff time available to check the resources that had been submitted, and by then it was only duplicating other gateways, including those that became Intute. BUBL met a similar fate.)

What went wrong with Intute, apart from the general shortage of funds after the credit crunch? We were proud of SOSIG, but it was apparent when I worked on merging it with other subject gateways, that they were at different levels of development and detail. The claimed advantage of Intute was that it enabled cross-searching, but it wasn’t so clear how much of an advantage that was. If you are a historian, do you need to be able to find resources relating to chemistry? And how much do you need a facility to export content, when most people are comfortable with cut and paste, and have their own way of storing information that they need to keep?

More generally, we don’t seem to hear much about subject gateways any more. A search on the term suggests that the main people who run ‘subject gateways’ now are professional organisations. They were labour-intensive – SOSIG had a distributed team of subject experts cataloguing resources, plus a team at ILRT keeping the whole thing going. And the whole process of resource discovery has changed. Better search engine algorithms have lessened the need for them, as relevant, popular resources rise to the top of the list of search results, so there is less need to go browsing through a catalogue.

But they haven’t gone away altogether. For a few years now I’ve been an editor of the Digital Classicist Wiki, which collects and catalogues ‘digital projects and tools of relevance to classicists’ (this last term is quite generously interpreted). The wiki works by voluntary labour from interested people, and is part of the Digital Classicist hub, which in turn is hosted by KCL’s Department of Digital Humanities. We meet for a sprint once a month, with a suggested list of resources to be added or edited, and contribute at other times. The interface is not flashy, and the tagging by category doesn’t catch everything (this is one of the areas I like to work on); the categories themselves are a folksonomy* of what people find useful, not a systematic hierarchical classification scheme. But it’s got over 500 entries in it now. Because of its focus on digital projects, it doesn’t attempt to link to every Classics-related website – for example, it doesn’t cover Classics departments or most journals – but it does include the sort of resources which were once found on Intute.

I don’t know whether similar sites exist for other subjects. But it would seem that in the case of Classics at least, we have reverted to the earlier model of subject gateway – created by volunteer experts and with basic functionality – as being more sustainable than the relatively short life of sites such as Intute.

(* I don’t use ‘folksonomy’ perjoratively – traditional classification schemes such as UDC or DDC would struggle with some of the categories which are useful for digital resources in classics. A topic for another post!)