Dear Les,
When Google Base launched, I blogged a note about its potential as a
rudimentary OA repository (Nov 16, 2005) and asked readers to let me know
how they were using it,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_11_13_fosblogarchive.html#113215452153523676
Since then I've heard nothing from my readers and nothing from the many
blogs and listservs that I monitor.
Start with the background reluctance of scholars to self-archive (from
ignorance or misunderstanding) and add the fact that Google Base is largely
unknown and non-academic. On top of that, while many scholars hear public
advocates or gentle persuaders in their own libraries urging them to
deposit their work in their institutional repository, they don't hear
anyone urging them to deposit their work in Google Base. Google Base could
be improved as a repository, for example by streamlining deposit and
allowing content export; but even if it were improved, it probably wouldn't
get many academic deposits until it raised its profile among academics,
either as authors or as readers.
Best,
Peter Suber
At 07:51 AM 2/27/2007, Leslie Carr wrote:
>Has anyone tried the facilities of base.google.com? It seems to be a
>rudimentary repository - not set up for research outputs but for
>items and events of everyday life. I suppose that it's intended to
>provide an analogue of "Open Access" for a much broader range of
>digital items, and one can see how the small but well-chosen sets of
>metadata will benefit Google's other search services.
>
>I did try out the "Reference Article" type and it has a few useful
>fields, so perhaps it could function as a really lowlevel self- archiving
>fallback for independent researchers. However, there is no
>easy way to query Google base for research articles, even after you
>have put them in!
>
>What I did find very interesting is their approach to developing
>schemas. Whereas others have tried folksonomies, that is community-
>defined sets of keywords, Google Base adopts the same idea not to the
>keywords or attribute values, but to the attributes themselves. This
>if you try to search for reference articles about something bland
>like "computers", you get the following search fields "Keywords,
>Pages, Publication volume, Publish date" but if you search for
>"Genes" you get the much richer set "Keywords, Pages, Mrna accession,
>Entrez gene id, Protein accession, Gene, Author, Publication name,
>Csnp, Publication date" because gene-related items are frequently
>described by those attributes.
>
>Perhaps something for the repository platforms to think about?
>--
>Les Carr
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