Press Release: Advanced Search and Discovery Service to Showcase UK Research Output, Mimas (Feb 2009)
Intute has a Repository Search that allows searchers to search across 98 UK academic eprints repositories.
From the press release:
"It is funded by JISC and led by Mimas in partnership with SHERPA, UKOLN (University of Bath) and NaCTeM and is designed to serve as a showcase for UK research and education.
Search services harvest the metadata and full-text out-put from institutional repositories, making the aggregated content searchable and browsable via a single interface. Intute Repository Search currently searches over 95 UK institutional repositories that are taken from the Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR.
The development path of this project involves simple metadata search, full-text indexing of documents, text-mining of full-text documents, automatic subject classification, term-based document classification, query expansion, clustering of results and browsing/visualisation of the search results. User group requirements have been integrated into the project's development iterations to ensure that the project adequately reflects what researchers want from a service such as Intute Repository Search."
This is extremely important for the content and the search technologies.
I hope academic libraries in Canada take note.
For more information see the slideshow from Vic Lyte, Project Director.
http://www.slideshare.net/viclyte/intute-repository-search-rsp-2009