Unit 10

Looking at the service providers at http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html, I first looked at digitAlexandria (http://digitalexandria.com/). "The digitAlexandria is a cross-platform system, composed by a set of very handy and fast tools, designed for building digital archives of any complexity, from the personal archive of a single researcher up to the repository of a big institution, such as a University or Research Centrer. It is based on a peer to peer network and is compatible with the Open Archives Protocol." Its goal is to offer simple to use tools for scientific researchers and institutions to build their own archives and collaborate with other researchers. They have about 1,000,000 scientific documents available for this purpose. They provide a long list of archives harvested by their system, along with their base URLs. I did not see any way to search or browse the collection. It does seem to provide a useful service in collecting these scientific resources together and making it easy for others to archive them as needed.

The next one I looked at was Perseus (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search?redirect=true). According to the Open Archives site, "The Perseus system harvests registered OAI repositories and incorporates the information into its search interface." The subject matter covered is Classics (history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world). There is a convenient browsing capability broken up by different subject matter, and the search function brought up relevant results, without an overwhelming number of records. This seems like a great resource for primary source research in the humanities.

I also looked at BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. According to http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/services/, "BASE is the multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources at Bielefeld University. BASE complements the current metasearch system for catalogues and databases of the Bielefeld Digital Library by disclosing multiple scholarly full text archives, digital repositories and preprint servers on the World Wide Web." The site has a very clean and simple layout, with options for browsing and basic and advanced searches. The search seemed fairly standard, and I thought it was interesting that you could browse either by DDC classification category or by document type.

Overall, I think that a federated catalog  is most useful when it focuses on a certain disciplinary field or subject matter, and when it has good browsing capabilities to allow you to see what types of records it holds, as well as easily accessible information on which collections it harvests from. I think that having a huge amount of records is good for recalling a lot of varied information on a topic, but could become unwieldy and less useful if the information becomes too overwhelming for the user to sift through.