How to Quick Start Your RC Portal: Highlights from the Portal Partner Seminar
On 27 January 2026, SAR hosted How to Quick Start Your Portal, a hands-on online seminar aimed at helping new and existing partners get their RC portals up and running in a sustainable and achievable way. With a growing number of portal partners across the world, the session addressed a common challenge: moving from portal setup to active, visible use.
The seminar opened with an overview of the RC portal landscape, highlighting that while around 40 portals are active, not all are yet public-facing. A key recommendation was to start with a single portal that can function both internally and externally, allowing institutions to gradually build content, workflows, and visibility without making the initial start-up-phase overly complex.
Communication Officer Linnea Langfjord Kristensen focused on how portals can create interest and sustained engagement, emphasising that a portal is more than an archive or publication platform: it is a living space that reflects how an institution thinks, researches, and experiments. Identifying clear objectives and maintaining regular communication through newsletters, bulletin boards, the institution’s website, and social media are essential for encouraging both users, students, staff and visitors to return to the portal. Practical tips included designing an inviting landing page, featuring recent expositions, links to calls, deadlines and user guides, and a short introductory text explaining the purpose of the portal. She also discussed how Portal Partners can avoid having empty portals when starting up, by using past research projects, events, or exhibitions as RC expositions that can be published right away. Finally, she underlined the importance of continuity: connecting RC publishing to teaching, celebrating new expositions internally, and regularly resurfacing older expositions by linking them to current events or wider themes.
Concrete examples from existing portals were then shared by the RC Management Team, Casper Schipper and Danielle Pozzi, showing different strategies for landing pages, feeds, collections, and groups. These examples illustrated how different types of expositions, project overviews, event documentation, or student work add value and help make the portal relevant and widely used across the institution, rather than functioning only for individual showcasing. The session also introduced core workflows for connecting and submitting expositions, clarifying the roles of authors and portal administrators. This included demonstrating how authors can link existing expositions to a portal, how submissions enter review workflows, and how portal administrators can manage visibility, issues, and publication status. Tips on how to lower thresholds for participation by encouraging the publishing of smaller, process-oriented expositions (such as project overviews, documentation, or teaching-related material) alongside more developed research outputs, were also shared.
Finally, the team presented a newly developed onboarding support package for new portal partners, reinforcing the RC’s commitment to long-term, sustainable portal development. While aimed primarily at new partners, the session welcomed all portals, underlining the value of shared learning and continuous exchange within the RC community.
