BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a multi-disciplinary

search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

to scholarly internet resources, created by

Bielefeld University Bielefeld University (german: Universität Bielefeld) is a university in Bielefeld, Germany. Founded in 1969, it is one of the country's newer universities, and considers itself a "reform" university, following a different style of organization ...

Library in

Bielefeld Bielefeld () is a city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 341,755, it is also the most populous city in the administrative region (''Regierungsbezirk'') of Detmold and the ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwee ...

. It is based on

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

such as

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features a ...

and

VuFind VuFind is an open-source library search engine that allows users to search and browse beyond the resources of a traditional Online public access catalog (OPAC). Developed by Villanova University, version 1.0 was released in July 2010 after two yea ...

. It harvests OAI metadata from

institutional repositories An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

and other academic digital libraries that implement the

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of O ...

(OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

Functionality

Users can search bibliographic metadata including abstracts, if available. However, BASE does not currently offer

full text search In text retrieval, full-text search refers to techniques for searching a single computer-stored document or a collection in a full-text database. Full-text search is distinguished from searches based on metadata or on parts of the original texts ...

. It contrasts with commercial search engines in multiple ways, including in the types and kinds of resources it searches and the information it offers about the results it finds. Results can be narrowed down using drill down menus (

faceted search Faceted search is a technique that involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on faceted classification of the items. It is so ...

). Bibliographic data is provided in several formats, and the results may be sorted by multiple fields, such as by author or year of publication. Paying customers include

EBSCO Information Services EBSCO Information Services, headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., a private company headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. EBSCO provides products and services to libraries of very many types around the ...

who integrated BASE into their EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS). Non-commercial services can integrate BASE search for free using an API. BASE becomes an increasingly important component of

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

initiatives concerned with enhancing the visibility of their digital archive collections. On 6 October 2016, BASE surpassed the 100 million documents threshold having indexed 100,183,705 documents from 4,695 content sources. As of 2022, it had indexed over 315 million documents from over 10,000 sources.

References

Literature

* Lossau, Norbert. 2004. "Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet," D-Lib Magazine, Volume 10, Number 6, June 2004. doi:10.1045/june2004-lossau * Summann, Friedrich and Norbert Lossau. 2004. "Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Moving from Theory to Practice," D-Lib Magazine, Volume 10, Number 9, September 2004. doi:10.1045/september2004-lossau

External links

* Internet search engines Open access (publishing) Bibliographic databases and indexes Scholarly search services {{Web-software-stub

Functionality

See also

References

Literature

External links