I wanted to draw your attention to a relatively new service for
searching multiple repositories that looks impressive and that is soliciting
feedback. My lack of domain expertise in
engineering limits my ability to use it properly, but some sample searches on
popular subjects (e.g. “environmental and green” for sustainable
building issues) yielded good results and gave a sense of how this sort of tool
can bring real retrieval efficiencies.
The Perx Project are also responsible for the
very useful 'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can
Increase Exposure and Visibility of Online Content, a non-technical guide
for content providers to demonstrate with case studies the value of harvestable
metadata of the OAI variety: http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/advocacy/exposingmetadata.htm.
David
*****************************************************
Pilot subject-based
cross-repository search tool now available.
A Pilot service http://www.engineering.ac.uk providing
subject resource discovery across a variety of digital repositories of interest
to the engineering learning and research communities has been released by the
PerX Project. Although the target repositories included in the Pilot are relevant to
engineering, the cross-searching methods and interface used, plus the range of
repository types included, should be of interest to many as a demonstrator of
one method of resource discovery across multiple digital repositories.
Twenty-eight repositories are currently cross-searched by the
Pilot. These include: the Directory of
Open Access Journals (engineering and technology sections), DSpace at MIT, the
Energy Citations Database, the GROW Digital Library, NASA Technical Reports,
Jorum, ePrints UK, Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
(NDLTD), National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS), Australian
Research Repositories Online to the World (ARROW), CISTI - Canada Institute for
Scientific and Technical Information, Caltech Earthquake Engineering Research
Laboratory Technical Reports, and several more established repositories of
interest to the engineering community. More
repositories will be added to the Pilot as they are identified and configured.
The Pilot’s Basic Search interface http://www.engineering.ac.uk/index.html?action=basic
and Advanced Search interface http://www.engineering.ac.uk/index.html?action=advanced
enable cross-searching of the repositories, and allow filtering by resource
type: articles, theses and dissertations, technical reports, books, learning
and teaching resources, key websites, industry news and new job
announcements. Overall, more than 1.5
million resources are cross-searched by the Pilot.
Access to the full text of items found is available from many of the
repositories. In a few cases, the full
items consist of details of books, articles, learning objects or websites, and
in some others the full text may be available to subscribing institutions or by
pay-per-view.
An
important purpose of the PerX pilot is to help scope a possible future
cross-search service. With this in mind,
feedback on the Pilot would be much
appreciated. A 60 second survey is
available at: http://www.engineering.ac.uk/index.html?action=quest and those providing feedback will be entered
into a draw to win £100 of Amazon vouchers.
Other documents available from PerX include:
Listing of Engineering repository sources
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/sourceslisting.htm
This document identifies the most significant repository sources of relevance
to the UK Higher Education (HE) Engineering community.
Engineering Digital Repositories Landscape
Analysis, and Implications for PerX http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/analysis.htm
This document analyses the digital repository landscape identified in
the Listing, and discusses various issues
concerning repository provision in engineering.
'Marketing' with Metadata - How Metadata Can
Increase Exposure and Visibility of Online Content http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/advocacy/exposingmetadata.htm.
This document gives a non-technical introduction to the means by which
content providers can share, or embed, their descriptive data (metadata) with
other websites, in standard and reusable ways.
PerX
(Pilot Engineering Repository Xsearch) is part of the JISC Digital Repositories
Programme (DRP) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_digital_repositories,
and is based at the Institute for Computer Based Learning,
For further details, please go to PerX http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/
Roddy MacLeod MA, DipLib, MCILIP
Senior Subject
Librarian
Tel (0131) 451 3576 Fax: (0131) 451 3164
http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/libram/roddy.html