Service Providers

Service providers who specialize in a topic provide useful functionality limiting the service to a specialized topic. For example, the Avano marine and aquatic sciences service provider (http://www.ifremer.fr/avano) clearly conveys what are the topic strengths of the service (marine and aquatic sciences.) Avano has a very useful Browse Archives feature, which displays the collections Avano draws from, links to the collections, the number of items harvested from each collection, and a description of the collection. Avano data providers include the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, the Aquatic Commons, and the Open Marine Archive.

The Scientific Commons (http://www.scientificcommons.org/) is a service provider which harvests a wide variety of scientific topics. The Scientific Commons has harvested 23 million records from 9 million authors in 950 archives. Searching a topic produces very large numbers of results (somewhat Google-like.) The search results can be filtered through only a limited number of options (Year, Language, and Sort Mode.) I think large-scale service providers such as the Scientific Commons call to question whether such services providers scale well for topic searching. The data providers to Scientific Commons are unidentified.

PLEIADI: Portal for Italian Literature in Open and Institutional Archives (http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi/index.php?sel_lang=english) incorporates a variety of functionality in a multi-featured portal. Features include personal accounts, recent news, a wiki, RSS, and related web resources. Searching PLEIADI, it appears that many of its data providers are Italian university repositories.

Generally, I think it is most important for a service provider to harvest relevant data providers. It seems to me that service providers specializing in a topic can be more useful (especially searching on topics) than large-scale comprehensive service providers. In addition to harvesting relevant data providers, I think it is important that service providers have powerful search interfaces that provide users with sufficient filtering options and other search options.