The Unseen Scholars

OPPIE: Bringing the World to the Laboratory

The Research Library's new, remarkably fast search and discovery engine, OPPIE, was born this year in May. "We worked on bringing this cutting-edge technology into production for about 4 years," says Miriam Blake, director of the Laboratory's Research Library. "The result is a search tool so well designed that it will be able to service the Laboratory's special needs long into the future."

The Research Library needs to provide Los Alamos employees with access to the world's scientific information, while preventing the world from knowing what information those employees are seeking. So in 1994, the library began to purchase content—articles and metadata—from publishers and store it in the library's own digital archive. Instead of searching the Web for research papers, Los Alamos scientists search this local archive, and their activities remain confidential and secure.

By 2000 the archive had swollen to over 70 million records and was having growing pains. Because of the way data were stored, the archive did not scale, and as the number of records increased, the archive got more difficult to search. Users began to notice that SearchPlus, the search engine that interfaced with the archive, was running more and more slowly.

A completely new type of archive, known as aDORe (pronounced "adore") was designed and developed by the library's Prototyping Team. This new archive has a unique architecture that incorporates many of Herbert Van de Sompel's standard technologies (OAI-PMH, OpenURL, OAI-ORE, info URI) and is highly scalable.

The library's Application Development Team then built OPPIE on top of aDORe, converting the millions of records into a standardized format and loading them into the distributed aDORe archive.The team built the OPPIE interface that researchers use to search the archive and continues to add other tools, many of which are implemented using freely available open-source software. OPPIE can run without expensive commercial products and should be well supported by the open-source community.

"We used widely accepted standards and open-source tools to make OPPIE sustainable and compatible with other systems. There is immense flexibility," says Blake. "We can plug in new tools and features very easily, so as the Laboratory moves into the future, we can be very responsive to evolving customer needs."