What researchers expect

Researchers and other users of digital information systems have high expectations for provision of digital content. Retrieval should be fast, direct (within a few clicks) and versatile. The current culture in the landscape of digital repositories does not fully support these expectations. While many valuable services have been established to search and retrieve bibliographic records (metadata), the resource itself is sometimes hidden behind several intermediate pages, obscured by authorization procedures, not fully presented or not retrievable at all. Optimal scholarly communication, however, would require the full resource being just one click away. Moreover, an easy retrieval of full-text and metadata facilitates the machine-based exploitation of content. Neither the harvested bibliographic record nor the crawled full-text on their own can enable the development of integrated, advanced services such as subject-based search combined with browsing through classifications, citation analysis and the like, but instead only the combination of both can enable this.

The full-text challenge

Fostering the direct access to textual resources has been identified as a major challenge within the DRIVER test-bed. While the DRIVER consortium dedicates any effort possible to approach this challenge technologically by processing the aggregated data, hosts of digital repositories can support DRIVER locally by offering content in a specific manner. The DRIVER Guidelines presented here will provide an orientation for local content providers how they should offer their content.

What's next?

Retrieval of full-text with bibliographic data is a basic but necessary step forward to approach rich information services based on digital repositories. Future DRIVER Guideline versions related to the DRIVER II activities will elaborate on further steps with respect to other information types such as primary data or multimedia and on more complex information objects that are made up of several resources.