Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2002

Publication Title

Journal of Digital Information

Volume

2

Issue

4

Pages

1-8

Abstract

Federating repositories by harvesting heterogeneous collections with varying degrees of metadata richness poses a number of challenging issues: (1) how to address the lack of uniform control for various metadata fields in terms of building a rich unified search interface, and (2) how easily new collections and freshly harvested data in existing repositories can be incorporated into the federation supporting a unified interface? This paper focuses on the approaches taken to address these issues in Arc, an Open Archives Initiative compliant federated digital library. At present Arc contains over 1M metadata records from 75 data providers from various subject domains. Analysis of these heterogeneous collections indicates that controlled vocabularies and values are widely used in most repositories. Usage is extremely variable, however. In Arc we solve the problem by implementing an advanced searching interface that allows users to search and select in specific fields with data we construct from the harvested metadata, and also by an interactive search for the subject field. As the metadata records are incrementally harvested we address how to build these services over frequently added new collections and harvested data. The initial result is promising, showing the benefits of immediate feedback to the user in enhancing the search experience as well as in increasing the precision of the user's search.

Original Publication Citation

Liu, X., Maly, K., Zubair, M., Hong, Q., Nelson, M.L., Knudson, F., & Holtkamp, I. (2002). Federated searching interface techniques for heterogeneous OAI repositories. Journal of Digital Information, 2(4), 1-8.

ORCID

0000-0003-1479-588X (Maly), 0000-0003-3749-8116 (Nelson), 0000-0002-6307-6884 (Knudson)

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