Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, October 27, 2006

Two more Google Custom search engines from SHERPA

Bill Hubbard at SHERPA has made two more OA-related search engines from Google Custom Search.  From his announcement:

Following on from the OpenDOAR Search that we launched yesterday, we have just created two new *SHERPA Search* services which may be of interest.

One is for all UK Open Access Repositories -

One search facility is for SHERPA Partner repositories -

They are also accessible from the SHERPA Home Page.

In each case, these search facilities may be useful for those of us wishing to search one of these sub-sets of the world's open access repository material. As we have pointed out on the site, for researchers looking for information in their field, then the global search service of OpenDOAR might be more appropriate. However, we have received enough queries and suggestions over the past few years to think that a full-text search service for the UK or for SHERPA Partners may be of benefit to some users like advocates or administrators; for example, in establishing a national picture of particular research....

What the Google tool does do is to give a quick and useful search from specified repositories or other sites. We have included the 800 plus assessed OpenDOAR repositories for the global OpenDOAR search, and nearly 80 repositories for the UK Search, but of course, the specification could be quite small - say 3 or 4.

This opens up other ideas and possibilities. It certainly gives a quick solution to searching across a number of repositories based at the same institution. For example, here in Nottingham we have Nottingham ePrints, Nottingham eTheses and Nottingham eDissertations among others. I know that in a number of institutions, there may be one or more separate repositories that have been set-up within a department - often, but not exclusively a computer science department. The Google tool gives the opportunity to have a cross-repository search within the institution.

These services are a trial: they not perfect and there may be some oddities thrown up from the Google system, but they are producing interesting results and raising some new ideas. We are collecting feedback and will pass this on to Google.