Flavio Costa, Jean‐Yves Le Meur and Tim Smith
or advanced search interfaces. They can query specific fields, such as title, author, etc., sort the results or apply a ranking criterion( like word similarity).
Users can restrict their search to a set of specific collections or sub‐collections, and the results returned can be merged into a single list.
Users can also customize the output format of the results: by default a summary of the results is displayed( brief HTML) but other formats such as detailed HTML, HTML MARC, XML and others are also provided. Invenio has been translated into 26 languages and supports Unicode for information retrieval. Users can also register an account in order to access restricted collections or to use Web 2.0‐like services( baskets, alerts, etc.).
As far as the administrators are concerned, Invenio’ s modular architecture enables them to control each part of the platform separately and handle the workflow of each record and user action more efficiently. New records can be submitted manually or harvested automatically, while the MARC 21 format used for the metadata is extensible making it easy for the administrator to define new types of records or custom fields of metadata. At the same time, multiple output and export formats are supported. An elaborate editing tool helps the administrator monitor and modify the different versions and revisions of each record and its attached files while data extraction tools can be used to extract keywords from records based on specific taxonomies, as well as other data. A custom task scheduler is included in the platform giving the administrator the chance to automate basic system operations and maintenance tasks, such as indexing, ranking, collection caching etc.
1.2 Invenio: From a CERN solution to an International Collaboration
Invenio dates back to 2002 when its development started at CERN( the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland, http:// www. cern. ch) in order to run the CERN Document Server( CDS, http:// cds. cern. ch /). CDS nowadays manages over 1’ 500’ 000 bibliographic records in high‐energy physics, covering articles, books, journals, photos, videos and more, it has approximately 8’ 000 registered users, representing a large portion of the high energy physics community, although the majority of users are not registered( more than 40’ 000) and serves around 25’ 000 queries per day. Since 2002 Invenio is freely available under GNU General Public License. The development team behind Invenio is a multinational collaboration of software engineers from various institutions such as CERN, Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron( DESY, Hambourg, Germany, http:// www. desy. de), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne( EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, http:// www. epfl. ch /), Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory( FNAL, Batavia, Illinois, USA, http:// www. fnal. gov /), and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory( SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA, http:// www. slac. stanford. edu /). Invenio is used worldwide by more than forty organizations and scientific institutions.
CERN and the international scientific community are committed to a long lasting effort for Open Access( Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics website, http:// scoap3. org). Invenio is fully in line with the Open Access philosophy and with the idea of facilitating the exchange of documents and information that is at the origin of the invention of the WorldWideWeb at CERN( Berners‐Lee 1989).
A solid and long lasting support to the evolution and progress of Invenio is setup thanks to its adoption by collaborating institutions and organisations in Europe( including the European Union), in the USA( including the SAO / NASA) and the United Nations( International Labour Office).
2. Invenio: Strong features for e‐Government solutions
How can the power of Invenio already be used for e‐Government?
As a comprehensive document repository system, Invenio already has the basic features you need to run your e‐Government solutions and e‐services, as discussed in this Chapter. Some important functions specific to e‐ Government applications are already available( or are being developed) and with Invenio you will easily be able to add features to fulfil your requirements of today and the evolution in the future. These options are discussed in Chapter 3.
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