In the sixth webinar of the Open Access Week@AIMS on Thursday, the 25^th of October 2012 Friedrich Summann, Madalina Oana Ungur and Manuel Hidalgo presented different Search Engines for open Access Web Resources. Friedrich Summann started with BASE developed by the University of Bielefeld. He was followed by Madalina Oana Ungur with the initiative OER Commons Green, platform for openly licensed educational resources. Manuel Hidalgo closed the session with a presentation in Spanish about the experience of SIDALC on how to compare the quality of full text entries in different library systems.

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Overview of 'BASE – a powerful search engine for Open Access'

The search engine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) which is a tool for searching Open Access contents and automatic classification is active since 2004 and includes 37,4 million documents from 2900 mostly academic repositories. Special features are a truncation function, a search history, sorting, a drilldown function and the cooperation of linguistic tools. Interoperability is guaranteed through the possibility to bind BASE to different interfaces.

Harvesting OAI-PMH interfaces, BASE is challenged by the integration of the search results like i.e. by the combination of links, corresponding metadata and the full text access of one source. The BASE initiative furthermore tries to normalize and enhance the metadata quality of difference source values like i.e. language values or the type of publication as the descriptions vary from each other in order to better aggregate similar contents.

BASE uses the information about subject repositories from registries like OpenDOAR and Disciplinary repositories. Still the objective of BASE is automatic classification by the automatic analysis of content information and the building of a knowledge database to provide an additional subject-based browsing.

Questions from the audience

Could you explain a little bit more about the automatic classification? A standards procedure is used where ddc codes from metadata of the documents are extracted and a knowledge base is built up. Other documents without classifiers can then be compared with the classified metadata in the knowledge base. 10% of the documents within BASE are now enhanced with classifier data.

About Friedrich Summann

Friedrich Summann is head of the LibTec Department (Library Technology and Knowledge Management) of Bielefeld University Library.  Currently he is working as a technical director for BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) .

He has been engaged in preparing the DRIVER and COAR Guidelines and the DINI Certificate 2010. Based on his expertise in this field he has conducted an OAI-PMH workshop at the CERN OAI7 conference in Geneva 2011.

Overview of 'Aggregating Best-in-Class Green Open Educational Resources'

The project 'OER Commons Green' was initiated in 2010 and has the aim to build up and support an open knowledge base for educational resource on environmental topics like climate change or pollution. The initiative is supported by the Greek research-oriented SME Agro-Know Technologies and the American ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education).

With around 40498 resources OER Commons covers a lot of material type and categories which can be browsed individually. The tool supports teachers with the provision of a wide range of open licensed environmental resources (Creative Commons), a rating and reviewing function, the possibility to create, share and download resources and the alignment of resources to Common core curriculum standards.

Learners can benefit from international environmental collections, advanced search option and tag clouds as well as the possibility to give feedback through social bookmarking, tagging, rating and reviewing contents.

Due to the high number of visitors (>30,000 per month) the published contents have a high visibility. Furthermore publishers get a feedback to their uploaded contents through a clear curation policy and quality assurance process by education and metadata experts.

About Madalina Oana Ungur

Madalina Ungur from Agro-Know Technologies (Greece) is a former English and Spanish language teacher and translator. After moving from her hometown in Romania to Athens to study the Greek language, in 2009 she started working as content expert in Agro-Know Technologies. Besides being involved in several EU-funded projects (Multilateral projects KA2 Languages and KA3 ICT), Madalina has organised and participated as a trainer in a number of Comenius and Grundtvig training courses on the use of ICT in education.

At present, she is a part-time MSc student on the 'Education, Technology and Society' course at the University of Bristol, UK and works on the OER Commons Green project as content curator.

Overview of 'Utilizando catálogos de bibliotecas para compartir contenido a texto completo de calidad: la experiencia del SIDALC'

La Alianza SIDALC (Servicios de Información Agropecuaria) que fue creado en el año 1999 en Costa Rica es un servicio de información de IICA (Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura) que ofrece informaciones agrícolas de biblitecas y instituciones de Latinoamérica. Su objectivo general es contribuir al bienestar rural y mejorar la competitividad del sector agropecuario. Facilita el acceso a informaciones agroperuarias y fomenta el intercambio entre las distintas sistemas y instituciones que ofrecen informaciones agrícolas.

Un gran parte de SIDALC forman los recursos especializados, foros y enlaces agrículas. Los recursos especializados incluyen una busqueda a documentos en varias temáticas agrículas que muchas veces se puede consultar en texto completo. La busqueda indica a una lista de instituciones que ofrecen documentos convenientes, a los países de tales organizaciones, a la base de datos, al número de documentos accesibles y además al link para accederlos. En caso de que no haya textos completos solo serán mostrados las referencias bibliográficas y es possible solicitar tales documentos directamente en la bibliteca. De las 312 bases de datos que se puede acceder con la busqueda de SIDALC, 62 ofrecen recursos digitales. Debido a la colaboración con redes nacionales y cursos sobre gestión de información se ha notado un importante aumento del 55% de recursos que son accesibles abiertamente a partir del año 2006.

Preguntas

De nacionalidad Costarricense, Ingeniero en informática, egresado de la Maestría en Computación con énfasis en Telemática del Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR).  Actualmente, trabaja como Especialista en Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación de la Alianza SIDALC, en el Instituto Interamericano de Cooperación para la Agricultura (IICA). Cuenta con 18 años de experiencia en el área de sistemas de información y los últimos 13 años se ha dedicado a colaborar con la coordinación técnica del SIDALC.

Dentro de sus actividades principales se encuentran, el mantenimiento y desarrollo de la plataforma, el soporte técnico a los miembros de la Alianza y la capacitación presencial y virtual a colegas del sector de información agrícola de América Latina y el Caribe.