On Apr 21, 2009, at 10:55 AM, Dr R. Sanderson wrote:

> How is this 'new type' of index any different from an index of OAI-PMH
> harvested material?  Which in turn is no different from any other  
> local
> search, just a different method of ingesting the data?



This "new type" of index is not any different in functionality from a  
well-implemented OAI service provider with the exception of the type  
of content it contains.

While OAI is/was popular, it was never really embraced by the  
commercial journal article indexers (Cambridge Scientific Abstracts,  
Web of Science, etc.) nor the commercial journal article publishers  
(Springer, Elsevier, etc.). Consequently their scholarly and in high  
demand content was not indexable. I think, but I'm not sure, Serials  
Solutions has made deals with such publishers to aggregate their  
content into a single whole and provide a more unified search  
interface it. We can see similar things in regards to OCLC and WorldCat.

Maybe these "new indexes" could be called "mega indexes" against  
traditional library content. Personally, such a thing is part of what  
I have been advocating as the content of "next generation" library  
catalogs. [1]

[1] http://www.library.nd.edu/daiad/morgan/musings/ngc-in-15-minutes/

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame