CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI6)

Ivy Academic Search, veterinary Science & Medicine. A subject repository for veterinarians.

Not scheduled

University of Geneva

Speakers

Martin Luijt, van (Utrecht University Library) Saskia Franken (Utrecht University Library)

Description

Utrecht University Library has developed an open access subject repository for veterinarians: Ivy Academic Search, veterinary Science & Medicine. This mainly open access repository collects data from relevant repositories in this field, using OAI-PHM as the harvest-protocol. The repository does not store publications, it is not intended to be used for self publication and archiving. Ivy Academic should become *the* place to go to for veterinarians. Utrecht has developed Ivy Academic Search in such a way that it scales to multiple subject repositories for other fields of expertise in the future. We have chosen to base our solution on the PKP Harvester 2 product, initially because of our good experiences with PKP’s Open Journal Systems (OJS). This decision has since been supported by thorough research of the software and our experiences during that research. Difficulties: There are three main difficulties we faced and for which we tried and will continue to find solutions: 1. We aim to exclusively collect records that offer open access full text but not all institutional repositories store their data freely available yet. We have to recognize and only show these items so our users will not be unpleasantly surprised. Until so fare we have not succeeded here and we have accepted a "pollution" of 10%. 2. We discovered that the metadata quality is still poor and each repository uses different standards (even though they all work with Dublin Core and can be harvested with OAI-PMH). We will have to normalize the harvested metadata in order to offer a good user experience for the veterinarians. 3. Besides quality, quantity is a big issue. Initially we aimed to focus on the 5 most relevant repositories in this veterinary field but even together they offer only a small amount of data. That is why we decided to harvest all known repositories in the veterinary field including sets of -amongst others- PubMed and DOAJ. Besides this shift to collecting as many records as possible, we will start to focus on partnership with relevant universities. Current state: Ivy Academic Search was unofficially launched in March 2009 and in the upcoming 6 months we will focus on quality of usage. Different user groups (academics, vets and students) will be asked to test Ivy Academic for veterinarians. Depending on the outcome the service will be officially launched later in 2009. The poster presentation is of interest to - technical developers, who want to share our experiences - content providers, f.e. universities, university libraries, research institutes, OA publishers etcetera who want to connect their (veterinarian) repository to Ivy Academic Search or want to make their (veterinarian) content available in Ivy Academic Search. We will keep focussed on new repository developments and connect new relevant repositories where possible. The service is available at : http://www.ivyacademicsearch.org More information: a.vanwesenbeeck@uu.nl

Summary

Utrecht University Library has developed an open access subject repository for veterinarians: Ivy Academic Search, veterinary Science & Medicine, as start of an overall library service on subject repositories.
The poster presentation gives insight to the scope of the project, the technology we used and the difficulties we met.