Do we need a new Google CSE for academic repositories? The old ones are looking rather long in the tooth, and their link-rot must be getting pretty bad by now.

Open DOAR search, according to the date on the foot of the search page, has not updated since Nov 2006. Similarly, ROAR‘s own Google Custom Search Engine has not been updated since Nov 2006.

I think it’s time for a new and up-to-date one. It shouldn’t be difficult to extract the URLs from a downloaded set of OpenDOAR country pages, which are still actively maintained. It’s even easier to download the .csv of all the URLs from ROAR and to extract them with Excel. As with OpenDOAR, it seems that the ROAR repository list is up-to-date, even if the CSE isn’t. One would then combine the lists and de-duplicate, clean the list, and then upload the cleaned list to a sparkly new Google Custom Search Engine. If I had the space to add another 2,000 URLs to my Google CSEs, I’d do it myself.