Changes at the LANL Research Library – SearchPlus to OPPIE
We do not announce the retirement of SearchPlus lightly. In the last decade, the LANL Research Library has made a significant investment in two areas that are uniquely our strength: we provide research content and discovery services in a secure environment; and we design and support systems and services to provide sustainable, reliable access to that content.
The Research Library locally loads content from a variety of commercial scholarly publishers, currently at a rate of ~90000 records per week. Local loading makes us very different than most other Libraries, who typically purchase content served through numerous vendor websites and database platforms. By locally storing over 90 million bibliographic records, 18 million full text articles, and several million related image and video resources, we are able to address both the unique security needs of LANL by keeping the research footprint of the Lab within the firewall and the unique content needs of our researchers by creating aggregations of content not available for any one single external source. In short, by developing a local knowledge base and building systems to store, discover, and deliver this content, the Library is able to provide scalable systems and cutting-edge, secure tools to address the unique needs of our security environment and our researchers.
This process, begun in 1996, is a journey: the Research Library did not start out with millions of records or terabytes of data, and we did not start out with an advanced technical team who knew how to build scalable, sustainable, distributed Library tools. SearchPlus was the 2nd generation library system, developed in 2000, and it has simply run its course. Aside from the fact that it is no longer scalable for the sheer quantity of data that we support and its accuracy continues to fade, the SearchPlus platform is outdated. Because this platform cannot be migrated to the new requirements mandated for Certification and Accreditation for systems at LANL, we must turn it off by September 30th.
In the last three years, foreseeing the eventual demise of SearchPlus, the Research Library has been working to architect and build a replacement for this highly used and popular tool. This replacement is OPPIE. (http://oppie.lanl.gov)
Like SearchPlus, OPPIE will provide one interface to search and explore all the Library's valuable research content, will continue to link to journal articles, conference papers, and other objects housed in the Library's repository, and will enable the data mining and citation impact information that the Library provides. Unlike SearchPlus, it has been designed to be scalable, flexible, and standards-based. You will notice OPPIE doesn’t have all the same features of SearchPlus and some features will work differently. Regardless of changes in how OPPIE works, we understand this is a critical tool for your work and research, and we are committed to meeting your research needs with OPPIE.
New content and collections will be added into OPPIE in the future, and new services and tools are added regularly to facilitate exploration and discovery. We are confident that with OPPIE, Search truly will yield Discovery.
We welcome your feedback for all stages of the ongoing process.
If you are interested, below are some links for further reading on some of the innovative technologies upon which OPPIE is built. And please contact us at askoppie@lanl.gov if you would like more information or want to discuss this transition further.
Further reading:
Herbert Van de Sompel, Ryan Chute, and Patrick Hochstenbach. The aDORe Federation Architecture , May 31, 2008. (arxiv.org:cs.DL/ 0803.4511v1)
Website for the aDORe archive
Liu, X., Balakireva, L., Hochstenbach, P., Van de Sompel, H. File-based storage of Digital Objects and constituent datastreams: XMLTapes and Internet Archive ARC files, June 3, 2005. (arxiv.org:cs/0503016v2)
Beth Goldsmith and Frances Knudson. Repository Librarian and the Next Crusade : The Search for a Common Standard for Digital Repository Metadata. D-Lib Magazine, September 2006.
Standards and Protocols used in OPPIE:
OAI-PMH: Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
ANSI/NISO Z39.88-2004: The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services
ISO/IEC 21000-2:2005: MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration (DID)
RFC 4452: “Info” URI Scheme for information assets with identifiers in public namespaces
MARCXML: Library of Congress MARC standard for the representation and communication of bibliographic and related information in machine-readable form.
ARC File Format |
