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<font size=3>[Forwarding from Waterford Institute of Technology.
--Peter Suber.]<br><br>
<br>
Dear Colleagues,<br><br>
To celebrate open access week 2009, (See:<br>
<a href="http://www.openaccessweek.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.openaccessweek.org/</a> ), We at WIT Libraries have launched
a<br>
federated harvesting and discovery service called ResearchScope.
It<br>
is a national portal designed to raise the profile of Open Access<br>
research in Ireland.<br><br>
See video presentation here:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUOTfMdXiAQ" eudora="autourl">
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUOTfMdXiAQ<br><br>
</a>It works by harvesting information from research repositories,
which<br>
present their records in an agreed standard called OAI-DC. By
pulling<br>
this information together in to one index and re-presenting them via<br>
ResearchScope as well as the original home repositories, the<br>
information is made more visible to web search engines. It is
worth<br>
noting that ResearchScope itself presents the aggregated data in
this<br>
way and it can therefore be indexed itself by other services.<br><br>
ResearchScope is powered by a piece of open source software called<br>
Harvester, produced by the Public Knowledge Project, a Canadian
group<br>
based in Simon Frasier University. (See: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ )
With<br>
minor modifications to the layout and the addition of a graphical<br>
'word cloud' search, ( See:
<a href="http://www.quintura.com/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.quintura.com/</a> ), we have<br>
produced an appealing and useful single point of access to open
access<br>
research in Ireland.<br><br>
The widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public<br>
access to scholarly research results is steadily gaining momentum
and<br>
ResearchSchope is also an attempt to broaden awareness/understanding<br>
of Open Access to research, on the part of research funders, the
Irish<br>
higher education community and the general public<br><br>
Visit:
<a href="http://researchscope.net/" eudora="autourl">
http://researchscope.net/<br><br>
</a>Regards,<br><br>
-- <br>
David Kane<br>
Systems Librarian<br>
Waterford Institute of Technology<br>
Ireland<br>
<a href="http://library.wit.ie/" eudora="autourl">
http://library.wit.ie/<br>
</a>T: ++353.51302838<br>
M: ++353.876693212<br>
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