A quick test of the new openresearchlibrary.org with keywords Mongolian folk song.

Of the top ten results, only three were very broadly on-topic:


1. Joro’s Youth: The first part of the Mongolian epic of Geser Khan. [Translation of an epic].

4. Long Narrative Songs from the Mongghul of Northeast Tibet. [Neighbouring tradition]

9. Virtual Reality in Village Folk Custom Tourism. [Somewhat connected].


Item 4 was Tibet, not Mongolian, but could be useful for those doing comparative work on regional intertwingling of traditions.

No further relevant hits were seen on the first page, at 20 results per page. There were no relevant results at all on the second page.

Full marks for slick and clean presentation. But, based on this quick test, at present the new service seems to have poor relevance-ranking for a general query. Using the more refined search Mongolian “folk song” gave dire results, surprisingly, and knocked out two of the three relevant results while adding no new ones.

Still, the record pages are useful, all lead without fuss to OA full-text, and are Google-visible. As such, the URL has been added to JURN. At present Google has only tepidly indexed 140 such pages from the new site, but a full indexing can’t be far off. JURN probably already indexes all the sources used by openresearchlibrary.org, but it’s good to have a second option and some researchers — on seeing two links to what are obviously the same book or chapter — may prefer to use the slicker in-browser viewer at openresearchlibrary.org.