BASA, the specialty megastore of OAI service providers

Looking at moving large amounts of metadata, I investigated some service providers who put it all together at one site. I am seriously impressed.

Bielefield Academic Search Engine, http://www.base-search.net, had countless resources about shadow puppets. Who in the world has countless resources about shadow puppets? Ok , not countless, exactly; 138 results for "shadow puppet". But that is seriously close to countless in the world of puppet specializations.

How do they do it? By having huge amounts of records in one place, I presume, because there is no stated focus on performance or art. In the case of my focus, this is a very good thing, because few service providers or resource repositories focus in this area, so searches usually involve a little bit here, a little bit there. Kind of like grocery store shopping in Tucson. Good meat here, my preferred tea there, this third one has cheap dairy but terrible produce so for that I go to a 4th store. So it is with searching for anything besides the popular brands, unless you have a megastore that caters to your selection among millions of others, or unless you create a specialized service provision yourself. I'd like to do the latter - create a one-stop puppetry portal - and now that I've found the former, the megaprovider, it will be easier.

Other service providers I've looked at include http://oaister.worldcat.org/, which despite it's reputation for hugeness only had 55 search results for puppets. This is a respectable number but far below the Bielefield. Think Safeway when you're looking for organic, versus Bielefield's Whole Foods flagship store in Austin.

Open Archives.EU (http://www.openarchives.eu/home/home.aspx?lang=en) required an annoying amount of extra decision making - search repositories or objects? and when you choose objects, which repository? but eventually I used it to to search for shadow puppet in the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ. My results set is not numbered and is presented essentially as a set of Google search results, with DOAJ not written anywhere on the search page. But the results are better than Google's regular keyword searches. If it didn't have an endless URL I would include it, but the path to get there is so confusing I would rather just start at the link at the beginning of this paragraph...or just forget about this feature altogether unless I find a more direct DOAJ route.