About BASE
The Search Engine
BASE is the name of the multi-disciplinary search engine for academically relevant web resources which was created and developed by Bielefeld University Library. It is based on search technology provided by FAST Search & Transfer, a Norwegian company.
As the open access movement grows and prospers, more and more repository servers come into being which use the "Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting" (OAI-PMH) for providing their contents. For the BASE project OAI metadata from academic repository servers are collected by a so-called "harvester" and are indexed by means of FAST software. BASE is a registered OAI service provider and contributes to the European project "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research" (DRIVER) since June 2006.
In addition to OAI metadata the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, which can be searched via one single search interface in one go.
In comparison to commercial search engines, BASE is distinguished for the following features:
- Intellectually selected resources
- Only document servers that comply with the specific requirements of academic quality and relevance are included
- A data resources inventory provides transparency in the searches
- Searches full text plus meta data (depending on the resource)
- Discloses web resources of the "Deep Web", which are ignored by commercial search engines or get lost in the vast quantity of hits.
- The display of search results includes precise bibliographic data (if provided in the resource)
- Several options for sorting the result list
- "Refine your search result" options (authors, resources, document type, language etc.)
