Enhancing Content Visibility in Institutional Repositories: Overview of Factors that Affect Digital Resources Discoverability Page: 857

                                
February 12-15, 2013

Usage of Open Access Repository Software
Worldwide
*   DSpace(912=41%)
SEPrints (31 8 = 14 %)
/                               D   [Unknown] (285 = 13%)
-- L Digital Commons (95 = 4%)
i OPUS (74 = 3%)
D-  dLih ra (56 = 3 %)
D   Greenstone (47- 2%)
GI C: ITENTdm (39 = 2%)
D   [107 CO others (410 = 18%)]
OpenDOAR 11-Dec-2012                                      Total = 2236 repositories
Figure 2: Worldwide Usage of Open Access Repository Software*.
*Source: Open DOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories), December 2012.
Current Best Practices and Ways to Increase Content Visibility
Search engines are the most popular way users search for information; they account for 88
percent of users' search time when they are looking for information (Bifet and Castillo, 2005). Most users
like to search by keyword, and they expect to retrieve useful results. Google is the most popular search
engines because it is very easy to use, it is free, it is extremely fast and produces useful results. For the
most part Google generates search results by matching search terms entered with Web page content,
usually referred to as full text searching. This form of searching usually has shortcomings, mainly in
precision. Precision refers to the proportion of the relevant documents retrieved in a search to the total
number of documents retrieved in a search.
Contrary to the long-held belief that Google ignores the data encoded in a Web page's meta tags,
Zhang and Dimitroff (2005) show that "metadata is a good mechanism to improve webpage visibility."
Metadata describes the nature of the digital items stored in a repository, including content, structure, and
access rights. In other words, metadata should provide multiple access points (e.g. author, title, subject).
To fulfill its purpose it is important for the digital curators to understand the ability of search engines to
index metadata elements and retrieve digital content using their embedded metadata elements.
Web crawlers operated by search engine companies harvest metadata and other information
about online objects and send that information back to the search engine. Specialized algorithms (that
take many factors into account) analyze the harvested data and decide whether or not to add the
metadata to the search engine's index. Farajpahlou and Tabatabai (2011) note that XML, as a syntax
ground for implementing the metadata elements of DC and MARC 21, maximizes the interoperability
between search engines and metadata initiatives. According to Taheri and Hariri (2012), Google and
Yahoo treat XML-based metadata with language-based tags (like DCXML) and without language-based
tags (such as MARCXML) in the same way. The same authors noted that all metadata elements of the
MARCXML and DCXML standards are compatible with the Google and Yahoo indexing software.
Institutional Repository systems need to be able to support interoperability in order to provide
access via multiple search engines. According to Hirwade (2011), "interoperability is the ability of
systems, services and organizations to work together and exchange information and use exchanged
information without special effort of either system"(p.59). Metadata interoperability facilitates the
exchange of information between repositories and enables World Wide Web searching. To make items
discoverable in the diverse online environment, the database needs to provide standards-compliant
database servers and expose the fullness of that metadata to a metasearch search client (Dorman,
2008). Metasearching, or the process of metadata being searched, enables connections to multiple

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