http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/43

Googlizing a Digital Library

Issue 2, 2008-03-24

This article describes how we dramatically increased access to our content through the use of sitemap files and sets of browsable links. Digital libraries, when characterized by search and retrieval capabilities, are normally part of the Deep Web, inaccessible to general web crawlers and hence to generalized search engines such as Google. Yet the primary goals of digital libraries include enhancing accessibility, expanding one's audience to the general public, and promoting the library. Leveraging the capabilities of popular search engines is a potentially powerful and low-cost method of meeting these goals. An overview is provided of the problem, the solutions being developed, as well as an exploration of the current methods of remediation and their applicability to two other search engines, Yahoo! and Ask. A selection of methods is implemented for a dynamically-delivered database of 1081 finding aids (in the form of Encoded Archival Description). Access statistics (ruling out crawlers) already indicate a remarkable increase in user and hit counts as a result.