Review of 3 search providers

The three service providers I looked at this week were all found on www.openarchives.org - primarily because the gita.grainger.uiuc.edu link was down during the time of this writing. From the list, I elected to explore the following providers: CASSIR (Cross Archive Search Services for Indian Repositories), Hispana (Spanish repositories), and NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archives).

CASSIR uses the same harvester we installed on our VM's. It includes 23 repositories, mostly science based, although one was specific to dentistry and another to management. Because I was already familiar with the layout, I found it easy to use and search. Most of the complaints I had about the search function in my practice machine were not present in this instance. For example, "All Archives" can be searched across multiple fields, and the results can be retrieved by clicking the "back" button.

Hispana is similiar to Europeana for European collections, but is specific to Spain. 129 repositories contribute to Hispana, and over 2.5 million digital objects are included. The 503 total digital collections can be searched individually, or one can search under specific repositories (default searches encompass all repositories). Hispana includes a diverse number of topics from across Spanish academia.

NORA is specific to Norway, and includes 6 broad topics (agriculture, humanities, social science, math/science, technology, and medicine). Dozens of repositories contribute (the list is long), however, a total number is not advertised. Unlike CASSIR, the search results show the name of the repository and, in many instances, the actual document can be downloaded in PDF format.

I was impressed with each of these, and found the metadata to be substantial and searching easy. None of them have an overwhelming number of repositories or records, and each appears manageable at current scale. I entered this exercise expecting to advocate for service providers that specialize in a small number of topics, which I imagine would benefit users and help maintain the most useful metadata. I still think there is real value to be had by this approach. However, large providers (like the oaister.org example) also have a role to play by bringing huge quantities of metadata together. Such large providers can provide greater context to collections, may be funded at a higher level which promotes preservation and sustainability, and may offer more dynamic searching.