About 50 K-State faculty have deposited their published journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers in the K-State Research Exchange, but many more faculty have lists of their publications (and sometimes links to their articles) on a personal or departmental website. Isn’t that the same thing? Not even close!
K-REx is built on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a set of standards for facilitating sharing of information (metadata) about articles, book chapters, dissertations, and other publications. OAI-PMH makes metadata available to search engines such as Google in a very structured way, which helps to produce higher rankings in search results. Because OAI-PMH repositories tend to collect high-quality research, search engines — particularly Google Scholar — make a point of indexing them.
In addition, OAI-PMH repositories are indexed by “harvesters” such as OAIster, which indexes all items in all OAI-PMH repositories worldwide (more than 20 million items). Sorry, but your list of publications on a personal/department webpage 1) won’t get indexed in OAIster, 2) probably won’t be indexed in Google Scholar, and 3) will likely get lost in a long list of hits on Google.
K-REx provides a permanent web address (URL) for each item, so get the best of both worlds: Deposit your work in K-REx, then link to the K-REx item from your webpage. Contact Marty Courtois (Repository Services, Hale Library, 785-532-4428, courtois@k-state.edu) to add your work to K-REx.
