Trying out the aggregator/repository CORE

Periodically I try out new search engines, data collectors and repositories I haven’t used, so today I discovered CORE, https://core.ac.uk/search, which at the moment has open access 135,500,000 publications, documents, blogs, trivia, thoughts, and according to my search, “President Trump,” over 725,000 items on our president even though he’s only been in office two years.

CORE’s mission is to aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public. In this way CORE facilitates free unrestricted access to research for all.

The co-investigator on the Euro Crisis in the Press (Japan) concluded even before Trump took office that he was a phenomenon like the world had never seen.

“Brexit has prevailed, the EU is in tatters, and finally Mr. Donald J. Trump has been elected President of the United States of America. Without any possible overstatement, the consequences of his ascent to the US presidency cannot be underestimated. It is a veritable game changer for global politics, an unexpected and glorious triumph for some, an unfathomable disaster for others.”

Checking his Tweets against the SOTU by three (American or British names) authors at Instituto Complutense de Análisis Económico (ICAE)

“State of the Union Addresses (SOUA) by two recent US Presidents, President Obama (2016) and President Trump (2018), and a series of recent of tweets by President Trump, are analysed by means of the data mining technique, sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their potential implications for the national mood and state of the economy. President Trump's 2018 SOUA and his sample tweets are identified as being more positive in sentiment than President Obama's 2016 SOUA. “

And from a UK blog, an interesting quote from Hillary Clinton even before he was the Republican candidate.

“It’s clear he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about. So we can’t be certain which of these things he would do. But we can be certain that he’s capable of doing any or all of them. Letting ISIS run wild. Launching a nuclear attack. Starting a ground war. These are all distinct possibilities with Donald Trump in charge.” –  Hillary Clinton, Speech in San Diego, CA, June 2, 2016

Yes, if I had time to browse 725,000 bad predictions, slanders, and hysteria, it would be interesting, but we’ve heard it all for 3 years.

Digital repositories

". . . the digital collections that libraries, museums and archives create with great effort and expense are not always well-indexed by Web search engines, thus decreasing the potential use and impact of those digital resources. OAIster, a "union catalog of digital resources" developed at the University of Michigan, provides access to over 16 million digital resources by harvesting OAI metadata from over 1000 repositories worldwide. About 45% of this material, the authors determine, is also indexed by Google, leaving the remaining 55% "hidden" in the deep web, unindexed by Web search engines." Hagedorn, Kat, and Joshua Santelli. "Google Still Not Indexing Hidden Web URLs" D-Lib Magazine 14(7/8)(July/August 2008)

No surprise to me. Hidden probably because librarians had little to say in the design, from the looks of it. I’ve never seen anything more poorly indexed than OSU’s Knowledge Bank. Some items look like they were retrieved from the circular file or store room by the secretary and then scanned and cataloged by the lowest paid, newest hire in the department--sometimes no title page, no date of publication, no thought to subject terms or even the official name of the Department. And really folks, a lot of “senior thesis papers“ need to be tossed in a box and stored at their parents, not indexed on the internet where a junior high kid or left wing blogger can find it.

Here lies the problem (from an October 2007 presentation) in my opinion. Keep in mind that a "community" is any division or department within the Ohio State University.

KB Community & Collection Policies

A Knowledge Bank Community has the right to:
• decide policy regarding content to be submitted
• decide who may submit content
• limit access to content
• customize interfaces to community content

You can search by author, title, subject, "community," or date. There is no search for "creator," or "publisher," even though that information appears in whatever main page you bring up. In a database by and about OSU, I'd expect more than five entries to come up for the author, "Ohio. . .", but that was it. As subject, however, Ohio State University brings up 11. Adding subdivisions, there are probably hundreds, including Ohio State Univerity--Libraries, and Ohio State University Libraries, and library and libraries. But to actually find documents created, sponsored, published or about Ohio State University Libraries and its faculty, you'd have to search "community," and sorry, but that's not what comes to mind when I think of a university department. If in desperation you try a general search on the word Ohio, you'll get thousands, including "front matter," and "back matter," of scanned journals with the word Ohio in the title.

If other repositories created with dspace with our tax money “with great effort and expense” are this poor, why should Google have to rescue it with private money?

DSpace and institutional repositories

If you aren't a librarian, archivist or pinhead, you won't care, but there's an article in the latest D-Lib magazine on Carrots and Sticks. When I first stumbled into an institutional repository (probably Ohio State's) I began specifically looking for them. As a former cataloger, I would give them a D- in access. Miss Oldfather and Miss Dean would have rapped my knuckles. If it weren't for Google, they'd be worthless. I don't care what they do in Portugal or Pennsylvania to market these to their faculty, staff and students, they are one more black hole of information that needed a good librarian to design and run it, but which looks like it was turned over to the campus IT department instead. They are the 21st century equivalent of the mid-20th century closed stacks, using the Katrina method of shelf arrangement.