Copyright (c) 2008 Mike Flakus
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Academic Web Search (Acaweb) software
Mike Flakus <[email protected]>


Project Description:
A federated search engine for searching many databases of
scholarly works in parallel. The application is written in PHP 
and Javascript and uses a MySQL database for caching search 
results and logging usage. 


Project Background:
Hello, my name is Mike Flakus and this is my open source project 
'Academic Web Search'. For the last year and a half, I have 
worked for the Portland State University Library as a 
programmer/analyst. In the search for scholarly works there is a 
great need for search consolidation. Currently, if a user wants 
to search for scholarly articles on the topic 'abortion', they 
might search Academic Search Premier, Google Scholar, Alt 
Healthwatch, ArticleFirst? and Child Abuse, Child Welfare and 
Adoption among others. Unfortunately, this process is often far 
too tedious and expects too much from the user. Hence, federated 
searching was created to help simplify this process. 

To facilitate this need, the PSU Library purchased the product 
'Central Search' from SerialsSolutions. The product has had 
numerous issues since its implementation a couple years ago. 
SerialsSolutions was only able to include less than 1/3 of the 
available vendor databases in the central search product and 
searches would often fail, or take longer than 10 minutes to 
return results. Due to budgetary concerns, the library may not 
be able to justify leasing this product in the future. This project, 
Academic Web Search, is being developed to potentially replace this 
3rd party application in the future. 


Installation:
Academic Web Search requires PHP 4+ (with the yaz extension
installed) and MySQL 4+. To install the necessary MySQL
database structure, you can use the file acaweb.sql in the
/mysql folder to load the necessary tables.
Once the MySQL tables have been created, you can enter the 
authentication information in the file /includes/config.inc.php
for the MySQL server. Additionally, if you have a username and
password for an ebscohost profile, you may also enter that
information in the config.inc.php file. If you would like to 
change the image for the openURL resolver, that image can be
replaced at /img/resolver.gif.


Offical GIT Repository:
Public Clone URL = git://github.com/mflakus/academic-web-search.git 


Project Wiki:
https://projects.cecs.pdx.edu/~mflakus/academic-web-search


Project Blog: 
http://acaweb.blogspot.com


Licensing:
Please see file COPYING in this directory for more information.