Overview of Library Administration

Portal Library Administrators create portal applications and portal components and make them available to portal administrators and end users in the Portal Library. The definitions in the library are used as templates for portal administrators to create and assemble portals and desktops for end users.

In some cases, changes to a definition in the library can be propagated to deployed portal resources. The portal library is the repository for portal components, including the following:

Book definitions
Page definitions
Portlet definitions
Portlet categories
Layout definitions
Shell definitions
Skin definitions

As the Library Administrator, you can modify the definitions in the Resource library. These modifications are global in scope and carry with them a higher degree of administration responsibility. When you create new portal instances of portal resources and put the in the Portal Library, they will have the following characteristics:

Your resource will show up in the Portal Library so that portal administrators can create instances of them to use as templates.
Your resource can be localized.
Your resource can be entitled at the enterprise application level. This means that when these resources are entitled, they are entitled for every instance.
Visitors can add these resources to their personal views of a portal via the Visitor Tools because they can choose them from the Library.
If an administrator or visitor deletes this resource from a portal, the resource can easily be retrieved from the Library.