New BASE version in BASE Lab

[Dirk Pieper <dirk.pieper@uni-bielefeld.de>]

Dear colleagues,

to keep in touch with the "dramatic growth of Open Access" we are 
happy to announce a new test  version of the OAI-Search-Engine 
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine, www.base-search.net) in 
our BASE Lab. The new version is developed on Lucene/Solr instead 
of FAST/Microsoft and has a VuFind-Search-Interface, which you 
can try here directly:

http://baselab.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/?l=en

The FAST index was pushed to a limit last year, but because the 
harvesting of repositories continued, the test index in our BASE 
Lab contains about one million documents more. Some repositories 
are not included in BASE Lab for technical reasons.

New repositories will be included in the new system only, please 
understand that we need some time for that; index update happens 
not on a weekly basis yet. There is also new BASE-OAI-PMH blog 
for those, who want to participate from our experience in 
metadata harvesting:

http://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/baseoai/

Unsurprisingly the FAST software works a little different from 
Lucene/Solr. At this stage, there is no multilingual search 
(using Eurovoc Thesaurus) and no lemmatization for different 
languages in Lucene. We have included the Porter Stemmer, but if 
someone gives us the money for example the "Rosette Linguistics 
Platform", we would be much happier ;-)). Of course there are 
some new features, like sending results to an email-address or 
RSS-Feeds.

In the next few months we want to finish the migration but for 
now we are looking forward for some feedback.

About BASE:

BASE is the name of the multi-disciplinary search engine for 
scientifically relevant OAI-Sources which was created and 
developed by Bielefeld University Library.  BASE is one of the 
biggest OAI-Search-Engines and includes some 25,5 million 
documents originating from more than 1.700 sources

BASE Search:
http://www.base-search.net/

BASE Lab
http://baselab.base-search.net

Best regards
Dirk

---------
Dirk Pieper
BASE
Bielefeld University Library
www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de