DLF Publication news:

Announcing the publication of "A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation
Services," by Martha L. Brogan.

http://www.diglib.org/pubs/brogan/

The following large-scale and important survey is now ready for widespread
publication and is available here in both html and PDF formats.  It will
come out in print in the New Year, and with it we expect to test a new
relationship with a print-on-demand company, which should both lower our
costs somewhat and ensure the continued availability of our publications in
a professionally-printed form.

From the Executive Summary

This report provides an overview of a diverse set of more than thirty
digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional
clusters, and then evaluates them more fully from the perspective of an
informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on
the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI-PMH), although some of them predate its inception and a few use
predominantly Z39.50 protocols.

Each service is annotated with its organizational affiliation, subject
coverage, function, audience, status, and size. Critical issues surrounding
each of these elements are presented in order to provide the reader with an
appreciation of the nuances inherent in seemingly straightforward factual
information, such as "audience" or "size." Each service is then grouped into
one of five functional clusters:

*      open access e-print archives and servers
*      cross archive search services and aggregators
*      from digital collections to digital library environments
*      from peer-reviewed "referratories" to portal services
*      specialized search engines

The report concludes with observations about current practices and future
directions. A list of major Web sites cited, a bibliography of cited works
and further reading, and an appendix with scope notes round out the report.