[BOAI] New National Federated Rarvesting and Discovery Service

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Waterford Institute of Technology.  --Peter Suber.]


Dear Colleagues,

To celebrate open access week 2009, (See:
http://www.openaccessweek.org/ ), We at WIT Libraries have launched a
federated harvesting and discovery service called ResearchScope.  It
is a national portal designed to raise the profile of Open Access
research in Ireland.

See video presentation here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUOTfMdXiAQ

It works by harvesting information from research repositories, which
present their records in an agreed standard called OAI-DC.  By pulling
this information together in to one index and re-presenting them via
ResearchScope as well as the original home repositories, the
information is made more visible to web search engines.  It is worth
noting that ResearchScope itself presents the aggregated data in this
way and it can therefore be indexed itself by other services.

ResearchScope is powered by a piece of open source software called
Harvester, produced by the Public Knowledge Project, a Canadian group
based in Simon Frasier University.   (See: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ ) With
minor modifications to the layout and the addition of a graphical
'word cloud' search, ( See: http://www.quintura.com/ ), we have
produced an appealing and useful single point of access to open access
research in Ireland.

The widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public
access to scholarly research results is steadily gaining momentum and
ResearchSchope is also an attempt to broaden awareness/understanding
of Open Access to research, on the part of research funders, the Irish
higher education community and the general public

Visit: http://researchscope.net/

Regards,

-- 
David Kane
Systems Librarian
Waterford Institute of Technology
Ireland
http://library.wit.ie/
T: ++353.51302838
M: ++353.876693212
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