On 20 Jul 2007, at 09:03, Mahendra Mahey wrote:
> JIBS and JISC Collections Workshop -
> Discovering eprints: finding needles in the haystack?
Andy Powell did 30 minutes work on this last year and showed that the
needles were actually quite easy to find with Google. (see http://
efoundations.typepad.com/efoundations/2006/10/pushing_an_open.html )
I have just repeated his exercise with some eprints selected from
repositories at Southampton, Loughborough, Strathclyde and
Westminster and found that the situation is unchanged. ie, it is very
easy to find a specific needle using the needle's title or using
keywords drawn from its title.
I suspect that the real difficulty in finding needles comes from the
fact that most of them haven't been put in the haystack in the first
place.
Can anyone point me at some data showing the difficulty that people
are having in finding eprints? I would genuinely like to know - I am
NOT a Google apologist (I believe that there are probably serious
theoretical flaws with using it for certain types of information
discovery), but I dislike perpetuating urban myths and I would like
to find some serious data.
---
Les
Received on Fri Jul 20 2007 - 12:57:56 BST