The Unseen Scholars

Library Services for Researchers

Jay Schecker

1663: Many people are surprised to learn that the Research Library employs several Ph.D. researchers, including the two of you. Why does the library need such high-powered talent?

Herbert: The library recognizes that our research, which has a significant international impact on technologies and policies for scientific communication, helps to create services that benefit researchers here at Los Alamos.

These days, scientists rarely go to the library to browse the journals for papers; they log onto the library from their computers and use a search engine to discover papers in a collection of thousands of electronic journals. The search engine is a library-provided "service." Other library services let the scientists download papers, extract citations, get alerted to new articles, get recommendations about what they should read next, etc. These services don't emerge out of thin air, and some of the more-advanced ones are built around my team's concepts and tools.

Johan: OPPIE, the Research Library's new search engine, is an example. It's very fast, much faster than the previous search engine. OPPIE searches a large archive of over 90 million records, most of them the bibliographic metadata—the title, author(s), abstract, etc.—of published articles. After finding the relevant metadata, OPPIE leads the user to the article itself.

1663: And you created OPPIE?

Herbert: The Library's Application Development Team created OPPIE. My team's focus was the archive where OPPIE's content is stored. The archive's design is very scalable, meaning we'll be able to store hundreds of millions of digital records without the system crashing or slowing down. The architecture is really novel and was designed and developed by my team. It's very modular, and all components are based on standards, some that I helped develop.

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Herbert Van de Sompel (left) and Johan Bollen