OAIster finds deep web pearls

I’m always on the lookout for academic articles related to federated search or the deep web to review. I’m embarrassed to not have heard about OAIster until Abe turned me on to it.

If you’re also new to OAIster, here’s a snippet from their About page:

OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources. We provide access to these digital resources by “harvesting” their descriptive metadata (records) using OAI-PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting). The Open Archives Initiative is not the same thing as the Open Access movement.

The About page goes on to say:

These resources, often hidden from search engine users behind web scripts, are known as the “deep web.” The owners of these resources share them with the world using OAI-PMH.

OAIster is great because it catalogs academic content in the deep web that many of us care about and it aims to catalog full text, not just metadata:

Eliminate dead ends. Users retrieve not only descriptions (metadata) about resources, they have access to the real digital resources. For instance, instead of just the catalog records of a slide collection of Van Gogh’s works, users are able to view images of the actual works.

So, what kinds of documents does OAIster have that we might care about?

A full record search for “federated search” yields 105 records. Dates range from 1999 to 2008. Document types include technical reports, presentations, text and PDF papers, and perhaps other types I’ve not noticed.

Here are interesting sounding titles of some documents:

1. Federated search engines and link resolvers …
2. Federated Search: What’s It All About?
3. Power-searching the “3-click” world : a federated search solution for clients at the University of Pretoria
4. Federated Search of Scientific Literatures: A Retrospective on the Illinois Digital Library Project
5. Federated search Searching information across the AstraZeneca organisation

A search for “deep web” yields 88 results. And, a search for “metasearch” yields 140 records.

There are plenty of interesting documents here, especially related to implementations of federated search, to give me plenty of material for reviews so, stay tuned.

Tags: deep web, federated search