Unit 10

It is an interesting question to determine how successful a service provider of harvested metadata is as we are entirely dependent on their efforts for our results. Without the service providers, the information does not get found easily. Which makes it curious to me that the service providers I was able to examine were rather a mix of strange bedfellows.

Ex. 1. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/search?redirect=true

The collections that provide the sources are disparate to say the least. The dominant collection is on the Art and Artifacts of Greek and RomanMaterials, while the second largest contributor is a collection of 19^th century American history, including the digital archive of the Richmond Times Dispatch newspaper. Subject, time period, place, etc. are not held in common and when searching the two faces of the collection are very apparent. What I am assuming is that it is a collection that the host, Tufts University, is finding this a convenience for its own reasons but it is not logical combination for the general user.

Ex. 2 http://re.cs.uct.ac.za/

This was a different style of searching than the norm. What the site does (from its frankly hideous looking interface) is allows you to set metadata parameters that you can then apply to the OAI compliant providers listed. There is not a way to search by key words and it requires knowledge of how OAI harvesting works to make sense. Again the collection of providers is from all sorts of institutions, around the world and with little obviously in common. It is kind of an inside out search tool. Another confusing point, the Open Archives list shows Virginia Tech as the host, but the site itself is from the University of Cape Town. Bit of a difference between the two!

Ex. 3 http://hispana.mcu.es/es/estaticos/contenido.cmd?pagina=estaticos/presentacion

By far the most successful of the examples was the Hispana site in terms of relevancy of search results. In large part this is due to the fact that it is a dual project with one side a directory of digital projects from Spain and the other a harvester for those same projects. This two in one approach meant that searches for common terms gave relevant results. The limitation is that it is all related to Spain. However, I would prefer to go to more than one service provider and get relevant results if they are both like the Hispana site rather than go to the Perseus site and have an unusable mix.