  Information retrieval (IR) is known facilitator of changes ongoing in human
society and vice versa. This is due to the fact that IR is a key component of
the digital ecosystems, where both information providers and information
consumers collaboratively address their problems with the use of technologies.
Organization and design of such ecosystems drives particular social impact for
all the players involved. In this paper, we study the impact made by a
particular IR ecosystem (semantic portal) used for management of academic
information resources and processes within the Ukrainian higher education. We
show how this portal is changing a collective mindset of the academic community
of its users. We argue that such impact becomes possible due to specific
organization of the ecosystem, where all the information resources, IR services
and related analytics (search, assessment, ranking, etc.) and IR users inhabit
the same semantic space under umbrella of the corresponding ontologies.
Personal values and preferences of the users configure on-the-fly the
corresponding IR analytics and enable personalized value-driven IR services,
making everyone feel involved into the organizational decision-making
processes. Four years of active use of this portal in university environment
has been reported and related impact is evaluated in this study.
