An EASIER way to search online engineering resource
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520010320310 |
| Date | 01 February 2000 |
| Published date | 01 February 2000 |
| Pages | 78-82 |
| Author | Geir Granum,Phil Barker |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
An EASIER way to
search online
engineering resource
Geir Granum and
Phil Barker
Description of EEVL
The Edinburgh Engineering Virtual
Library[1], EEVL, consists of several user-
searchable online databases. The range of
services has grown over time. Initially there
was just the EEVL catalogue of quality
Internet resources. Now there are several full
text search engines and bibliographical
databases.
The main resource is the EEVL catalogue.
This consists of over 4,900 quality controlled
catalogue entries describing engineering
Internet resources. This database is served to
the user via a specially written WWW server
implemented in the programming language
Java. This database system was created early
in EEVL's existence and combines fast search
response for end-users with powerful
cataloguing facilities for the database
maintainers. The drawback with this
implementation is that it is ``memory
hungry'', since all data structures are held in
memory at any time and it is difficult to
maintain since the database structure is
described within the Java program.
The engineering newsgroup archive is
another service that was developed early in
EEVL's history. This database consists of an
archive of 40 days of articles from engineering
related Usenet newsgroups available from the
local Usenet news server at the Heriot-Watt
University. New articles are downloaded and
old articles are removed once a day and the
current articles are first indexed and then
served using a collection of freely available
computer programs. This consists of an
indexer that creates the database, an
indexserver that make the database available
and a WW client that provides a CGI
interface between a WWW browser and the
database. The indexer and indexserver are
written in the ``C'' programming language
and the client is implemented in PERL. This
system is used as an ``off the shelf'' system.
The only configurable parameters are
information about which newsgroups to get
from what news server and the look of the
user interface.
The UK engineering search engine is one of
EEVL's full text search engines. This service
is created by a process of first gathering pages
from all UK based resources in the main
EEVL catalogue, then indexing these pages
and serving the resulting database through a
WWW interface. The gathering process is
The authors
Geir Granum and Phil Barker are Technical Officers
both based at ICBL, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh,
Scotland. E-mail: granum@icbl.hw.ac.uk;
philb@icbl.hw.ac.uk
Keywords
Online retrieval, Information systems, Databases,
Engineering, Libraries, Virtual reality
Abstract
EEVL, the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library, consists
of several distinct resources, which exist as separate
databases. This article describes the approach taken to
tackle a particular problem that was identified through
evaluation studies, namely, that searches of the EEVL
catalogue too frequently matched no records. The
solution described in this paper is a cross-search facility
for three of the EEVL databases.
Electronic access
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is
available at
http://www.emerald-library.com
Specialized articles
78
Online Information Review
Volume 24 .Number 1 .2000 .pp. 78±82
#MCB University Press .ISSN 1468-4527
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