Il servizio di emeroteca virtuale al CASPUR ed il suo nuovo motore di ricerca

CASPUR has been offering since 1999 a web based Digital Library service called “Emeroteca Virtuale” (EV), which guarantees full-text permanent access to scholarly scientific publications of five commercial publishers, the biggest ones in a worldwide context. Nowadays EV is a service accessed by more than 350.000 users, mostly researchers belonging to nearly 30 middle and south Italy universities and research bodies. Users can browse and search on this platform up to 8 million full text articles from 5.000 e-journals, mainly in Scientific-Technology-Medicine (STM) area. Since 1999 EV service is based on a commercial software called Science Direct, whose main functionalities are articles browsing and articles searching. This software is going to show its limits with such huge amount of searchable articles, especially when search times are concerned. This is why starting from the second half of 2008 CASPUR staff which is managing this digital library has planned a migration from Science Direct search engine, to a new one, chosen in the context of open source software: Lucene from Apache Software Foundation. Nowadays Lucene is used in many web based applications around the world, especially in the field of scientific digital libraries. Concerning EV service, Lucene integration with Science Server environments is going to end in the next few months. Exhaustive tests have been performed using the whole contents, giving really promising results, with a mean search time 10 to 100 shorter than Science Direct search response. This definitively states the choice of Lucene as a good search engine and represent a valid starting point for “Emeroteca Virtuale” whole service renovation.