VASCODA: A German scientific portal for cross-searching distributed digital resource collections

Abstract

The German information science community - with the support of the two main funding agencies in Germany - will develop a scientific portal, vascoda, for cross-searching distributed metadata collections. In platitudinous words, one of the services of vascoda is going to be a "Google"-like search for the academic community, an easy to use, yet sophisticated search-engine to supply information on high-quality resources from different media and technical environments. Reaching this objective requires considerable standardisation activity amongst the main players to harmonise the already existing services (e.g. regarding metadata, protocols, etc.). The co-operation amongst the participants including both of the funding agencies is creating a unique team-work situation in Germany thus strengthening the information science community. © Springer-Verlag 2003.