One of the stated goals of the knowledge gateway is that it is to become a "personalized online portal" for Texans capable of delivering customized content. The ability to provide dynamic personalized content is perhaps the most ambitious part of the knowledge gateway vision and one that will likely become an essential success factor for the project. It is also a recognition of the inadequacies inherent in sharing large amounts of digital library materials via passive interfaces such as search pages, finding aids and container descriptions. It has been suggested that online information resources that are not tailored for different users will increasingly be viewed by those users as defaulting on an obligation to provide the best services possible.
For my Knowledge Gateway class research project, I chose to evaluate implicit information gathering methods for the purpose of personalizing a Web experience. Among the questions that I wanted to answer in my research were: