Another question surely is "Are people actually looking for eprints, per
se?" Obviously, they are, if they are looking for a specific 'needle',
but otherwise is it not the case that people are increasingly looking
for, for want of a better word, 'stuff' of various kinds?
This list is interested in the repository haystack, and we all want to
make the repository haystack visible. However, is there evidence that
that haystack is of any more interest to typical searchers than other
haystacks?
PerX findings http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/analysis.htm#needs suggest
not, for one sector at least.
Roddy
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr
> Sent: 20 July 2007 12:11
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: JIBS/JISC Workshop on 'Discovering Eprints
>
> On 20 Jul 2007, at 09:03, Mahendra Mahey wrote:
>
> > JIBS and JISC Collections Workshop -
> > Discovering eprints: finding needles in the haystack?
>
> Andy Powell did 30 minutes work on this last year and showed
> that the needles were actually quite easy to find with
> Google. (see http://
> efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/10/pushing_an_open.html )
>
> I have just repeated his exercise with some eprints selected
> from repositories at Southampton, Loughborough, Strathclyde
> and Westminster and found that the situation is unchanged.
> ie, it is very easy to find a specific needle using the
> needle's title or using keywords drawn from its title.
>
> I suspect that the real difficulty in finding needles comes
> from the fact that most of them haven't been put in the
> haystack in the first place.
>
> Can anyone point me at some data showing the difficulty that
> people are having in finding eprints? I would genuinely like
> to know - I am NOT a Google apologist (I believe that there
> are probably serious theoretical flaws with using it for
> certain types of information discovery), but I dislike
> perpetuating urban myths and I would like to find some serious data.
> ---
> Les
>
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