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BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on search technology provided by Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian company.

BASE is a registered service provider for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), and has contributed to the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER) project since June 2006.

OAI metadata are "harvested" for the BASE project from scientific digital repositories that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and are indexed using FAST's software.

In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

BASE is distinguished from commercial search engines by the following features:

• Resources are academically selected
• Document servers must comply with specific requirements of scientific quality and relevance
• Searches are provided with transparency by a data resources inventory
• Full text searches plus metadata are available (where available)
• BASE discloses resources of the deep Web, which are often ignored by commercial search engines or get lost in vast quantities of hits
• Search results are displayed with precise bibliographic data (where available)
• There are several options for sorting the result list, and search results can be refined by author, resource, document type, language, etc.)

[edit] See also

• List of academic databases and search engines

[edit] External links

• BASE search