IITA launches new Bibliography
To fulfill its open access mandate, IITA has launched an upgrade of the Institute’s research and knowledge output repository, the IITA Bibliography. The new version was unveiled on 14 August as part of the IITA Communication Open House, which took place in Ibadan, Nigeria.
The new IITA Bibliography is built on the open-source DSpace software; it is a groundbreaking change in how IITA makes information available to its community and the public. DSpace is used extensively in the open access community, powering over 2,000 open repositories, and is interoperable with other repositories. It supports optimal discoverability and reusability of the content by complying with Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) standards and all its metadata are exposed through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
In a presentation outlining the features of the new platform, IITA Digital Librarian, Soji Oloyede noted that the new IITA Bibliography prioritizes research visibility with better search engine indexing and accessibility to materials in the repository. It makes provision for altmetrics, which is one way research outputs become more visible through social media, citations, and article downloads. With this, the number of potential users has increased as more people can find the data using search engines such as Google Scholar.
The new IITA Bibliography contains thousands of research works including journal articles, books, and book chapters, conference proceedings, training and extension materials, theses, and other publications from 1972 to the present time. These are frequently updated with new content and legacy records.
The new platform has a responsive design which optimizes the experience for all users as the site automatically adapts to the user’s device whether it is a desktop or mobile device. With optimized navigation for all screen sizes, users can browse through the repository quickly and easily by collection, author, year, subject, and title. Advanced Search is available and search metadata such as title, abstracts, keywords, etc. A variety of filters for narrowing search results are also available, such as filtering content by Author, Date, Topic, Content-Type, Keyword, Region, or Country.
Soji Oloyede outlining the features of the new Bibliography.
The new IITA Bibliography offers several helpful features and content for users, including:
- Citation information for each work, including a permanent uniform resource identifier (URI), which allows researchers to properly cite and link back to all works used in their research
- Author profiles with biographies and other published works
- Links to citations in Google Scholar
- Icons for publications that have undergone Academic Peer Review
- Related Items such as other titles in a series
- Title suggestions based on what other users have downloaded
- Chapters or books published by external (non-Bank) publishers, once the publisher’s embargo (if applicable) has lapsed
- Links to associated data sets in the World Bank Microdata Catalog
The URL to the new IITA Bibliography is http://biblio1.iita.org.
