Subject specfic federated/meta/resource searches
The PerX project will develop a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities. This pilot will be used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of full scale subject resource discovery services. [funded by JISC as part of the digital repositories program]
In fact, JISC current projects contain a number of projects using Portal, or Gateway, or Discovery in their brief details. This suggests that there are a lot of people who want to give their users a way of finding the information that they need.
But is this approach going to work?
If there are umpteen projects funded by JISC, and others funded by other people, and these projects all have a native interface, which needs learning. We are left with users being faced with lots of choice. Not that choice between resources isn’t a good thing, but first you need to find them, and then you need to decide if they are good for you.
Enter the portals and gateways; evaluating and making suggestions from people who know for those that don’t. But there is still a huge amount of data to sift, even with search capabilities, on these sites. Not to mention the native interfaces….
But what if we could identify at a glance (a machine readable glance) that a database or repository had a particular set of searchable indexes, or web services? What if those databases could describe themselves to the world, much as you might do in an ice breaker, giving a potted history of your life and where you worked? What if you could also tell whether you were allowed access, and if not, then perhaps you could see who had the keys?
What if those glances where themselves indexed?
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