The UPS Prototype. An Experimental End-User Service across E-Print Archives

Abstract

A meeting was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 21-22, 1999, to generate discussion and consensus about interoperability of publicly available scholarly information archives. The invitees represented several well known e-print and report archive initiatives, as well as organizations with interests in digital libraries and the transformation of scholarly communication. The central goal of the meeting was to agree on recommendations that would make the creation of end-user services -- such as scientific search engines and linking systems -- for data originating from distributed and dissimilar archives easier. The Universal Preprint Service (UPS) Prototype was developed in preparation for this meeting. As a proof-of-concept of a multi-discipline digital library of publicly available scholarly material, the Prototype harvested nearly 200,000 records from several different archives and created an attractive end-user environment. This paper describes the results of the project. This is done in two ways. On the one hand, the experimental end-user service that was created during the project is illustrated. On the other hand, the lessons that the project team drew from the experience of creating the Prototype are presented.