Curator is the acronym for Chiba University's Repository for Access to Outcomes from Research (http://mitizane.ll.chiba-u.jp/Curator/) - a repository to capture, preserve and make publicly available intellectual digital materials from research activities on Chiba University campuses, including peer-reviewed articles, theses, preprints, statistical and experimental data, course materials and software.
Launched in 2005 as the first institutionary repository in Japan, it has been playing a leading role in the development of digital repositories on Japanese campuses both with respect to technology and library's advocacy.
Curator holds 2,000 records in both English and Japanese, including departmental bulletins, technical reports, preprints and articles, theses and research papers. The partnership provides the opportunity to address the technical challenges of indexing Japanese language content.
"One of the known problems with Japanese Web content is indexing documents containing Japanese character strings without word boundary spaces," said Mr. Hauruo Asoshina, Division of Information and Management of Chiba University Library. "Our collaboration with Scirus has enabled us to partner to find an efficient solution, and with Scirus' expertise in powering search results, we know that our valuable content will be made more accessible to students and researchers worldwide."
In addition to adding Curator to its index, Scirus is offering its search expertise to Chiba University by powering the search capability on the Curator site. This two-tiered approach makes their valuable content easier to find. As part of the partnership, Scirus will also participate in a joint communications program designed to demonstrate the value and increase awareness of the repository on the Chiba University campus.
With this expansion, Scirus continues its leadership as the premier partner in search technology for institutes looking to make their institutional repositories and their content more visible. By using a special indexing process that combines the repository's metadata with its full text, Scirus is able to offer a more comprehensive search experience. The partnership with Chiba University, one of the leading scientific and technical universities in the Asia-Pacific region and the first in Japan to establish an institutional repository, reflects Scirus' commitment to global content coverage and further establishes the success of the Scirus partnership program.
"Scirus has proven particularly successful in the Asian-Pacific region, in particular because of its functionality and ease of use." said Sharon Mombrú, Managing Director of Scirus. "Scirus recognizes that approximately a third of our users are in the Asia-Pacific region, and we are pleased to be able to serve that region's scientific and academic communities by offering high quality content from leading area institutes."
Scirus, a science-focused search engine available on the Internet, supporting over one million researchers, scientists and students worldwide offers users a unique combination of free Web information and journal content, clearly branding search results from proprietary sources, assuring users the validity of the content. Web sources include research institutes, governments, scientific organizations, conferences, scientists' homepages and company homepages worldwide. Optimized for science-related queries, Scirus uses a dictionary with over 1.6 million scientific terms, unique pattern recognition tools and linguistic analysis, to classify the content type and recognize the relevance 250 million scientifically relevant pages, Scirus offers users unique search functionalities such as the ability to search on bibliographical information and specific content types.