Martha Brogan, A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, Digital Library Federation, 2003. Excerpt: "This reports provides an overview of a diverse set of more than thirty digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional clusters and then evaluates them more fully from the perspective of an informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH), although some of them predate its inception and a few use predominantly Z39.50 protocols. In the opening section of this report, each service is annotated with its organizational affiliation, subject coverage, function, audience, status, and size. Critical issues surrounding each of these elements are presented in order to provide the reader with an appreciation of the nuances inherent in seemingly straightforward factual information, such as 'audience' or 'size.' Each service is then grouped into one of five functional clusters: [1] open access e-print archives and servers; [2] cross archive search services and aggregators; [3] from digital collections to digital library environments; [4] from peer-reviewed 'referratories' to portal services; [5] specialized search engines." The open-access eprint archives receiving special attention are arXiv, the NASA Technical Report Server, and PubMed Central.
(Thanks to David Seaman.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/16/2004 10:47:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
