Why was HERIPORT developed?

HERIPORT was developed as part of our Honours Project at the University of Cape Town. We have developed the first central South African National Heritage Portal, using the best practises in heritage archive systems to collect metadata from multiple local heritage archives. The portal provide cross-archive discovery services for end-users, such as searching and browsing archives through a central Web portal. Thereby, we anticipate that the introduction of a national heritage metadata aggregator system will allow users such as academics and anyone interested in South Africa heritage to access and search through a range of historical resources through a single Web portal without experiencing the above-mentioned limitations linked to the usage of the current software available.
As a low-resource South African national heritage metadata aggregator has not yet been developed, and as we build on the philosophies of current low-resource software tools, this project would contribute significantly to the research community.