DPLA Vertical Search Demo

Names: Ivy Anderson, Brian Tingle
Affiliation: California Digital Library, University of California
URL: http://crawlspace.cdlib.org/

The DPLA Vertical Search Demo investigates the viability of using web crawler technology to provide a single point of access to distributed collections hosted by digital libraries and other repositories. A vertical search engine provides focused and precision searching on a curated group of resources, and potentially provides a lower barrier to entry for relevant content than similar unified search tools. The Search Demo was built entirely with existing open-source applications.

The demonstration system enables discovery across a targeted group of publicly accessible library and cultural heritage content hosted in a variety of digital library platforms. Approximately 300,000 unique URLs from 100 sources have been included in the demo index, the foundation of which is provided by The Institute for Museum and Library Services Digital Collections and Content registry.