Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, December 04, 2007

BASE expands its index and adds multi-lingual searching

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) now indexes over 500 OA repositories.  From yesterday's announcement:

At the end of October 2007, BASE has indexed the 500th repository. At present BASE includes 519 sources, which means an increase of some 80 % compared to November 2006 (283 sources). For details please see [this chart].  (the blue line represents the number of documents, the red bar graph represents the number of repositories).

Since OpenDOAR lists some repositories without OAI-interface, we decided to show that BASE can also crawl repositories. At special request of Nature Publishing, we crawled and indexed two Nature repositories, which do not yet provide an OAI interface: Nature Precedings and Nature's Signaling Gateway.

Primarily in international professional circles, the multilingual search option in the BASE-Lab aroused great interest. Therefore we decided to integrate the option into the BASE search forms. By using the Eurovoc-Thesaurus you can now broaden your search. If you choose "basic terms only" a search term will be searched in up to 21 languages at the same time (no matter which language you use), provided that the search term is included in Eurovoc (for every language 6,500 basic terms are included). If you choose "basic terms and used-for-terms" synonyms for this search term will be searched additionally. All in all 239,000 terms are included in Eurovoc.