Re: JIBS/JISC Workshop on 'Discovering Eprints

From: Steve Hitchcock <sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:42:33 +0100

Google makes the known needles easy to find in IRs. Here's the harder
part. How do I find what I don't know about? In other words, it's
there in an IR, just like there's lots of stuff in repositories, but
how do I find it if I know nothing about it? Is it just random
chance, or is there a more systematic way? Alternatively, how do IRs
advertise their contents to people?

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 7698 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

At 12:11 20/07/2007, Leslie Carr wrote:
>On 20 Jul 2007, at 09:03, Mahendra Mahey wrote:
>
>>JIBS and JISC Collections Workshop -
>>Discovering eprints: finding needles in the haystack?
>
>Andy Powell did 30 minutes work on this last year and showed that the
>needles were actually quite easy to find with Google. (see http://
>efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/10/pushing_an_open.html )
>
>I have just repeated his exercise with some eprints selected from
>repositories at Southampton, Loughborough, Strathclyde and
>Westminster and found that the situation is unchanged. ie, it is very
>easy to find a specific needle using the needle's title or using
>keywords drawn from its title.
>
>I suspect that the real difficulty in finding needles comes from the
>fact that most of them haven't been put in the haystack in the first
>place.
>
>Can anyone point me at some data showing the difficulty that people
>are having in finding eprints? I would genuinely like to know - I am
>NOT a Google apologist (I believe that there are probably serious
>theoretical flaws with using it for certain types of information
>discovery), but I dislike perpetuating urban myths and I would like
>to find some serious data.
>---
>Les
Received on Fri Jul 20 2007 - 13:18:44 BST