From Chronicle of Hugher EDucation: April 9, 2004
Website:http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=uqhyv7n4hnlw9ke78oapjlpbflewz
7dm
(The URL given above is a temporary URL valid for a few days as free source
for fulltext for everyone, but the fulltext is available to subscribers
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 09:44:02 +0530
From: VYASAMOORTHY /IKP/HYD
permanantly at some other URL. URL given here only to show the source)
Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the
world to provide a way to search the institutions' collections of scholarly
papers, according to university officials.
A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. If all goes as
planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months, said
MacKenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT's libraries. She
said the search would probably be an option on Google's advanced-search
page. http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
"A lot of times the richest scholarly literature is buried" in search-engine
results, said Ms. Smith. "As more and more content is on the Web, it's
harder and harder to find the high-quality stuff that you need."
Google has long indexed university Web pages, but the new project will allow
users to direct their searches to on-campus repositories of scholarly
materials, sometimes known as superarchives. Those archives contain copies
of academic papers, technical reports, drafts of articles, and other work by
a university's professors. Scholars can choose whether their works will be
available to all
Internet users or only to others on their own campuses.
The participating universities have tagged all the materials in their
superarchives with "metadata tags" -- hidden codes that contain catalog
information and summaries -- that can help a search engine like Google's
sort through the material.
MIT has developed free software, called DSpace, http://www.dspace.org/
that colleges and universities can use to set up superarchives. About 125
universities have done so, but no one had created a tool that searches
across the archives, said Ms. Smith.
So far, each of the 17 participating institutions has, on average, about
1,000 papers in its archive, said Ms. Smith. But she said the collections
are growing rapidly. "It's going to scale up pretty fast over the next few
years," she said.
Ms. Smith said the universities also plan to work with providers of other
search engines. "It's not like we're working on an exclusive arrangement
with Google," she said, adding that the universities are neither being paid
nor paying for the arrangement. "We may even do our own thing over time" to
search across the archives, she said.
In the pilot test, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., a nonprofit
library organization, has set up a search process that will serve as an
interface between Google and the universities. "This will make it a lot
easier to find a particular article," said Thomas Hickey, a chief scientist
for OCLC.
Ms. Smith said that she hopes to include all 125 DSpace users in the search
tool in the future.
Officials at Google could not be reached for comment.
Besides MIT's, https://dspace.mit.edu/ the institutional archives that
will be included in the pilot test are at:
* Australian National University http://dspace.anu.edu.au/
* Cornell University http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/
* Cranfield University http://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk
* European University Institute http://cadmus.iue.it/dspace/
* Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
http://repository.ust.hk/index.jsp
* Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis
https://dspace.iupui.edu/
* Minho University https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/
* Ohio State University https://dspace.lib.ohio-state.edu/index.jsp/
* Parma University http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it:8080/
* University of Arizona https://dlearn.arizona.edu/
* University of Calgary https://dspace.ucalgary.ca/
* University of Oregon https://ir.uoregon.edu:8443/dspace/
* University of Rochester https://dspace.lib.rochester.edu/
* University of Toronto https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/
* University of Washington
https://digital.lib.washington.edu/dspace/
* University of Wisconsin http://dspace.library.wisc.edu/dspace/
Dr.P.Vyasamoorthy, Advisor, Virtual Information Centre,
Turkapally Village, Shameerpet Mandal, RR District, Hyderabad 500078 INDIA
Email: vyasamoorthy@icicikp.com
Phone - Office: +91(40)23480053 Fax: +91(40)23480007 Phone Residece:
+91(40)27846631
