April 12, 2004

Google has long indexed university Web pages, but the new project will allow users to direct their searches to on-campus repositories of scholarly materials, sometimes known as superarchives.

Those archives contain copies of academic papers, technical reports, drafts of articles, and other work by a university's professors. Scholars can choose whether their works will be available to all Internet users or only to others on their own campuses.

Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions' collections of scholarly papers, according to university officials.

A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. If all goes as planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months, said MacKenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT's libraries. She said the search would probably be an option on Google's advanced-search page.

"A lot of times the richest scholarly literature is buried" in search-engine results, said Ms. Smith. "As more and more content is on the Web, it's harder and harder to find the high-quality stuff that you need."

The participating universities have tagged all the materials in their superarchives with "metadata tags" -- hidden codes that contain catalog information and summaries -- that can help a search engine like Google's sort through the material.

MIT has developed free software, called DSpace, that colleges and universities can use to set up superarchives. About 125 universities have done so, but no one had created a tool that searches across the archives, said Ms. Smith.

So far, each of the 17 participating institutions has, on average, about 1,000 papers in its archive, said Ms. Smith. But she said the collections are growing rapidly. "It's going to scale up pretty fast over the next few years," she said.

Ms. Smith said the universities also plan to work with providers of other search engines. "It's not like we're working on an exclusive arrangement with Google," she said, adding that the universities are neither being paid nor paying for the arrangement. "We may even do our own thing over time" to search across the archives, she said.

In the pilot test, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc., a nonprofit library organization, has set up a search process that will serve as an interface between Google and the universities. "This will make it a lot easier to find a particular article," said Thomas Hickey, a chief scientist for OCLC.

Ms. Smith said that she hopes to include all 125 DSpace users in the search tool in the future. Officials at Google could not be reached for comment.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

        

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