Sum of Humankind’s Knowledge Available Online

Great title for an article, huh? It appears that scientific research in Europe is becoming available to the public and other researchers through the DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) Search Portal, which serves as a door to European Open Access research. The idea is to create a “library of libraries,” where individuals can readily search across repositories throughout Europe.

European researchers have created D-NET, software that links “information collected on diverse computer platforms, using legacy software which can still ‘talk’ or work with older systems in more than 25 European languages.” The software regularly harvests publications to provide access to information from numerous repositories. Visitors to the site are encouraged to use the software to set up other portals and are pointed toward examples of test cases where other groups are using it. The DRIVER portal site reports the following information about the collection:

• approximately 1,000,000 documents
• found in journal articles, dissertations, books, lectures, reports, etc.
• harvested regularly from more than 200 institutional or thematic repositories
• from 23 European countries
• in 25 languages.

The portal allows you to search broadly across repositories, but also limit your search by repository, language, document type, and date. At present the focus is on textual documents, but the idea is extend into other types of media. Current goals are to continue building the infrastructure and increasing the number of participating repositories. Another development of the initiative was the creation of Guidelines for Repository Managers, a document that outlines how to make content compatible with DRIVER. This type of document is an instructional tool to ease the process of increasing interoperability. The initiative is funded by the Research Infrastructure priority of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.

As a “library of libraries,” the DRIVER portal seems like a super repository that allows you to access a larger network of published materials through a single search, but I do not believe it goes beyond published works to data sets. However, the possibility for expansion into broader scholarly communication is there and the openness to using the software may allow for other uses within the scientific community.