The Pacific Rim Library: A Surprising Pearl

The Pacific Rim Library (PRL) is an initiative of the Pacific Rim Digital Library Association (PRDLA). The project began in 2006 using the OAI-PMH paradigm and now holds over 300,000 records harvested from OAI data provider libraries around the Pacific. PRL's goal is to enable the sharing of digital collections amongst PRDLA members and the world, but greater unexpected benefits have been discovered. Through mirroring their metadata, PRL increases the chance that their data will be discovered in Google and other general search engines. With its many disparate collections, PRL is not a repository for traditional information discovery and retrieval. Initially users will bounce from a Google hit to the PRL metadata record in Hong Kong and then begin an intensive search on the original site which hosts the full digital object, in Vancouver, Honolulu, Wuhan, Singapore, or other PRDLA member location. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.postprintpublished_or_final_versio

SEARCH ENGINE COVERAGE OF OPEN ACCESS CORPUS IN THE FIELD OF BIOTECHNOLOGY

The paper presents the results of an exploratory study conducted to find percentage of OAI-PMH compliant Metadata harvested by two search engines (Google and Scirus) using two hundred and ten articles selected from DOAJ corpus. The first filly results were analysed to gauge the presence of DOAJ articles in the field of Biotechnology with their rank and duplication among the retrieved set of results. The results reveal that Google harvest maximum articles (i.e. 76.67%) compared to Scirus while Scirus rank all the retrieved articles among the .first ten results when Google jail by 6%

Observed Web Robot Behavior on Decaying Web Subsites

We describe the observed crawling patterns of various search engines (including Google, Yahoo and MSN) as they traverse a series of web subsites whose contents decay at predetermined rates. We plot the progress of the crawlers through the subsites, and their behaviors regarding the various file types included in the web subsites. We chose decaying subsites because we were originally interested in tracking the implication of using search engine caches for digital preservation. However, some of the crawling behaviors themselves proved to be interesting and have implications on using a search engine as an interface to a digital library

Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts

Over the past fifteen years, our perspective on tackling information interoperability problems for web-based scholarship has evolved significantly. In this opinion piece, we look back at three efforts that we have been involved in that aptly illustrate this evolution: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE, and Memento. Understanding that no interoperability specification is neutral, we attempt to characterize the perspectives and technical toolkits that provided the basis for these endeavors. With that regard, we consider repository-centric and web-centric interoperability perspectives, and the use of a Linked Data or a REST/HATEAOS technology stack, respectively. We also lament the lack of interoperability across nodes that play a role in web-based scholarship, but end on a constructive note with some ideas regarding a possible path forward

Archeologia e Calcolatori: un’esperienza pionieristica nel mondo dell’Open Access e dell’Open Science

Online open access circulation of the journal ‘Archeologia e Calcolatori’ started in 2005. International standards developed within the Open Archives Initiative paradigm immediately offered fascinating solutions to disseminate metadata describing the journal’s content. The most relevant protocol for Open Archives implementation is OAI-PMH. Several software applications to support OAI-PMH have been proposed by different institutions and some enjoyed brilliant success. However, in certain situations the deployment of an OAI-PMH conformant repository remained problematic. For small research institutions and university departments, most of the existing OAI applications seemed difficult to implement. In this paper, the author recalls the main steps that guided the journal towards a simplified approach to the OAI implementation, one suited to small and medium-sized archives, creating a system operating now for 15 years

Getting Indexed by Bibliographic Databases in the Area of Computer Science

Every author and publisher is interested in adding their publications to the widely used bibliographic databases freely accessible in the world wide web: This ensures the visibility of their publications and hence of the published research. However, the inclusion requirements of publications in the bibliographic databases are heterogeneous even on the technical side. This survey paper aims in shedding light on the various data formats, protocols and technical requirements of getting indexed by widely used bibliographic databases in the area of computer science and provides hints for maximal database inclusion. Furthermore, we point out the possibilities to utilize the data of bibliographic databases, and describes some personal and institutional research repository systems with special regard to the support of inclusion in bibliographic databases

Harding Magazine Winter 2007 (vol. 15, no. 1)

Publication distributed to alumni and friends of the university