Services

FAQ

What is BASE?
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is the multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources at Bielefeld University. Try searching with BASE right now!
What is BASE Lab?
BASE Lab is the public test area of Bielefeld Academic Search Engine. There you can find exiting new search options, tools and tests, before we bring them online.
Go into the BASE Lab.
What is Different about BASE?
BASE facilitates effective and targeted searches and retrieves high quality, academically relevant results. Other than search engines like Google or Yahoo BASE searches the deep web as well. The sources which BASE includes are intellectually selected and reviewed. That's why data garbage and spam is excluded from the beginning.
Read more details about the project.
The people behind BASE
based on the search technology provided by FAST Search & Transfer (Norway) BASE was developed by Bielefeld University Library. About us: the BASE Team.
BASE future developments
The strategic project BASE will be continuously developed and is supposed to substitute the current metasearch of the Digital Library in the medium-term.
More Details.
Get in touch with us!
We highly appreciate your comments and feedback.

What are licenced resources?
Some of the sources which are indexed in BASE are subject to licence.
You may search these sources without any restrictions and the retrieved hits will be displayed in your result list.
But, if you want to access the material, for example the full-text of a journal article, individual or institutional authentification is necessary.
The licence check is always performed by the content provider. In case you fail to access a source although you or your institution supposedly have a licence, please contact your IT department or the content provider.
What are metadata?
Especially in an academic environment you will often come across documents containing metadata. These are descriptive elements assigned to a document in order to specify it both in technical respect and in terms of content. Metadata are for example author's names, publication dates, abstracts, language or - in case of a journal title - details regarding the title or the issue.
If metadata are available, you may perform a targeted search for authors. More Details
In the result list you may refine the search result by categories. More Details
Web pages usually do not provide metadata. BASE is able to automatically recognize the language used in a document, but up to now it is not possible to extract certain aspects (e.g. an author's name) from the text of a page.

Why do I always end up on the German-language pages?
The BASE web pages are presented in the language, which is preselected in your browser settings. These settings can easily be changed (e.g., if you use the Mozilla "Firefox" browser, choose "Preferences" and then "Settings"). Switch to "English" as preferred language and the BASE pages will be presented in English immediately.
Is there a print version of the BASE web pages available?
The BASE web pages are designed to automatically change into a printer optimized version when the printing command is released.
Do I have to enable Javascript, Java or something similar?
The BASE web pages are designed to show complete functionality without Javascript, Java, …
Are the pages "optimized" for specific browsers or browser versions?
There are no restrictions of any kind. The pages are properly designed according to web standards (XHTML, CSS) and comply with the WCAG regulations.