{"id":1584,"date":"2009-06-12T22:57:33","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T22:57:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=1584"},"modified":"2009-06-12T22:57:33","modified_gmt":"2009-06-12T22:57:33","slug":"open-access-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2009\/06\/12\/open-access-search\/","title":{"rendered":"Open access search?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following on from my previous post<\/a>… a search for “open access” site:www.google.com\/coop\/<\/em> was discouraging. There are about twenty “living-dead” Custom Search Engines from 2006, but no large ones updated after 2006 (so far as I could tell from a quick visit).<\/p>\n

Pouring out all this open access content is all very well, but where’s the competition and development in open access search<\/em>? <\/p>\n

And where are the simple common standards for flagging open content for search-engine discovery and sorting, for that matter? Judging by the structure and look of most academic repositories, internet search-engines are the last things on their minds.<\/p>\n

Now of course I’m viewing things from the outside, as an independent curator and social entreprenuer, not a librarian or OA evangelist. But it seems to me that burying your PhD thesis deep in a repository cattle-car — seemingly with only a few keywords, an ugly template and an impenetrable URL for company — isn’t serving it or the author very well. Especially in terms of metadata and tagging leading to full-text search discovery. As the authors of “Experiences in Deploying Metadata Analysis Tools for Institutional Repositories” recently wrote in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly<\/a><\/em> (No. 3\/4, 2009)…<\/p>\n

“Current institutional repository software provides few tools to help metadata librarians understand and analyse their collections.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which doesn’t bode well for search-engines aiming to hook into and sort the same metadata. That sort of statement might have been acceptable in 1999, but it’s a damning statement to hear from librarians in 2009. And another paper in the same issue concludes that there is…<\/p>\n

“a pressing need for the building of a common data model that is interoperable across digital repositories”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I wouldn’t know a Dublin Core from a Dublin Pint, but how difficult would it have been to build a search-engine friendly tag that allows a repository to tell the world “this is a root free-to-all full-text file” and “you’re not going to get any full-text for this title”? Or to allow the “one-click” filtering out of science and medical-related OA material across search results from a thousand repositories?<\/p>\n

This could be done at the URL level. For example by using a standard universal URL structure that could be read by machines and humans alike. For a journal it might run something like:<\/p>\n

   www.technology-history.org\/journal-issue-004\/free-full-text\/2009_adams_preindustrial_water_mills.html<\/p>\n

Where preindustrial_water_mills are the first three words of the article title. <\/p>\n

Without even accessing the document, a human can now glance at the URL in search results and read off:<\/p>\n

   Journal name (Technology History<\/em>)
\n   Issue number (Number 4<\/em>)
\n   It’s from a journal
\n   It’s free full-text
\n   The year published (2009<\/em>)
\n   The author surname (Adams<\/em>)
\n   The first three words of the article title (“preindustrial water mills<\/em>“)<\/p>\n

For a repository it could look something like:<\/p>\n

   www.uni.edu\/oa-repository\/free-full-text\/theses\/history\/history-of-technology\/2009_adams_preindustrial_water_mills.html<\/p>\n

And with a uniform standard for URL structures, university IT techies would not be allowed to fiddle with the directory structure and thus break the URL. All<\/em> full-text files in U.S. repositories could then be searched simply by indexing one<\/em> line:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.*.edu\/oa-repository\/free-full-text\/<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anyway, rant over. I did find a large Google CSE for Economics<\/a>. Not much use for the arts and humanities you might think, and last updated in 2006, but due to its sheer size (23,613 sites from apparently reputable sources) searches for…<\/p>\n

“creative economy” keyword<\/p>\n

“creative industries” keyword<\/p>\n

“art market” keyword<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… all seem to show it still has some use as a discovery tool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following on from my previous post… a search for “open access” site:www.google.com\/coop\/ was discouraging. There are about twenty “living-dead” Custom …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-search","category-how-to-improve-academic-search","category-my-general-observations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}