A New Zealand digital library for computer science research

Abstract

A large amount of computing literature has become available over the Internet, as university departments and research institutions have made their technical reports, preprints, and theses available electronically. Access to these items has been limited, however, by the difficulties involved in locating documents of interest. We describe a proposal for a New Zealand-based index of computer science technical reports, where the reports themselves are located in repositories that are distributed world-wide. Our scheme is unique in that it is based on indexing the full text of the technical reports, rather than on document surrogates. The index is constructed so as to minimize network traffic and local storage costs (of particular importance for geographically isolated countries like New Zealand, which incur high Internet costs). We also will provide support for bibliometric/scientometric studies of the computing literature and our users.