APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING
Dear Colleagues,
Please find below an announcement from OpenDOAR for a search facility
based on OpenDOAR holdings.
Regards,
Bill
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) Press Release
For release Thursday 26th October 2006
Press queries contact [log in to unmask]
* Search through the OpenDOAR *
OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - is pleased to
announce the release of a trial search service for academics and
researchers around the world. See: www.opendoar.org/search.php
OpenDOAR already provides a global Directory of freely available open
access repositories that hold research material: now it also offers a
full-text search service from this list of quality-controlled
repositories. This trial service has been made possible through the
recent launch by Google of its innovative and exciting Custom Search
Engine, which allows OpenDOAR to define a search service based on the
Directory holdings.
It is well known that a simple full-text search of the whole web will
turn up thousands upon thousands of junk results, with the valuable
nuggets of information often being lost in the sheer number of results.
Users of the OpenDOAR service can search through the world's open access
repositories of freely available research information, with the
assurance that each of these repositories has been assessed by OpenDOAR
staff as being of academic value. This quality controlled approach will
help to minimise spurious or junk results and lead more directly to
useful and relevant information. The repositories listed by OpenDOAR
have been assessed for their full-text holdings, helping to ensure that
results have come from academic repositories with open access to their
contents.
This service does not use the OAI-PMH protocol to underpin the search,
or use the metadata held within repositories. Instead, it relies on
Google's indexes, which in turn rely on repositories being suitably
structured and configured for the Googlebot web crawler. Part of
OpenDOAR's work is to help repository administrators improve access to
and use of their repositories' holdings: advice about making a
repository suitable for crawling by Google is given on the site. This
service is designed as a simple and basic full-text search and is
intended to compliment and not compete with the many value-added search
services currently under development.
A key feature of OpenDOAR is that all of the repositories we list have
been visited by project staff, tested and assessed by hand. We
currently decline about a quarter of candidate sites as being broken,
empty, out of scope, etc. This gives a far higher quality assurance to
the listings we hold than results gathered by just automatic harvesting.
OpenDOAR has now surveyed over 1,100 repositories, producing a
classified Directory of over 800 freely available archives of academic
information.
We are pleased to report that OpenDOAR recently came as the leader in a
global survey of 23 repository listings carried out by John Hopkins
University for the purposes of analysing repositories and their
holdings. Survey paper at:
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla72/papers/151-Oliver_Swain-en.pdf
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
OpenDOAR is a continuing project hosted at the University of Nottingham
under the SHERPA Partnership. OpenDOAR maintains and builds on a
quality-assured list of the world's Open Access Repositories. OpenDOAR
acts as a bridge between repository administrators and the service
providers who make use of information held in repositories to offer
search and other services to researchers and scholars worldwide.
For more information, go to the OpenDOAR site - http://www.opendoar.org
The excellent Google Custom Search Engine facility is available for
anyone to use at - http://www.google.com/coop/cse/overview
OpenDOAR gratefully acknowledges the generous support of its funders;
The Open Societies Institute, the Joint Information Systems Committee,
the Consortium of Research Libraries and SPARCEurope
OSI - http://www.soros.org
JISC - http://www.jisc.ac.uk
CURL - http://www.curl.ac.uk
SPARCEurope - http://www.sparceurope.org
--
Bill Hubbard
SHERPA Manager
SHERPA - www.sherpa.ac.uk
RoMEO - www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
JULIET - www.sherpa.ac.uk/juliet/
OpenDOAR - www.opendoar.org
SHERPA
Greenfield Medical Library
University of Nottingham
Queens Medical Centre
Nottingham
NG7 2UH
UK
Tel +44(0) 115 846 7657
Fax +44(0) 115 846 8244
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