The homepage is clean and simple. Thumbnail pictures and
short descriptions of five New Publications are displayed on the large center
and right-hand panels. The left-hand panel provides links to Browse, Advanced
Search, Other (About, Terms of Use, FAQ), Site Statistics, Resources, social
network sites, and RSS feeds. A simple search box is spread across the top of
the main panel.
Search and Retrieval
Hoping to learn something positive about economic conditions
in the country in which I live, I keyed spain into the search box. Results came
immediately, showing 1-10 of 28 items. Each item listed title, author(s), date,
and the first three lines of an abstract. I noticed that results are displayed
automatically in Relevance order, descending, and that I could change the order
to Title or Publication date, and ascending. I could also change the number of
items displayed on a page to six other quantities from 5 to 100. I changed the display
number to 40, requested Publication date, descending, order, and hit Apply.
The World Bank concentrates on reports
of economic development and does a lot of trans-national comparisons. I had to
skip over several items in the new results display before I found a citation
with a visible mention of Spain. The first Spanish cite was "Corporate
Growth, Age and Ownership Structure: Empirical Evidence in Spanish Firms,"
an article from the Journal of Business
Economics and Management in 2011. Other interesting cites included "Public
Transport Funding Policy in Madrid: Is There Room for Improvement?" (probably,
but I personally think the Madrid transit system works unusually well already)
and "Spain: Development, Democracy and Equity," in which the visible
abstract reminded that "Spain stands as one of the few countries in the
world which have completed a successful transition from authoritarianism and
relative underdevelopment to democracy and economic abundance in the last half
century."
Metadata Galore
You can get a full record display by clicking on the title
in the initial results display. That action reveals the full abstract and a
formatted citation, such as this one:
“Boix, Carles. 2004. Spain: Development, Democracy and
Equity. © Washington, DC: World Bank.
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/9209 License: CC BY 3.0
Unported.”
An "XML export" link clicked through to a page
that showed the full citation, with abstract, with XML coding. I realized that
I was beginning to see evidence that the World Bank is serious about allowing
and encouraging its data to be distributed by others.
This record indicated the availability of a PDF download
(size and name provided) and a link to "Associated URLs." At the
associated URL I found a related report, World
Development Report 2005, available in eight languages. There was also an
indication of the Collection in which this report appeared (World Development
Report Background Collection) and a link to a page for the collection.
Then I clicked on the "Show full item record metadata"
link and I was blown away with detail--it was like looking at a coding sheet or
full MARC record. In addition to six topic identifiers, there were assorted
other fields to indicate language(s), dates of acquisition and availability,
regions, and a Google Scholar link--and more. I was impressed with the thorough
application of metadata and again realized that this content is easily adaptable
for use by numerous other databases and aggregators. Viewing the metadata is
also a good way to get ideas for searching using the Advanced Search interface,
which you can get to by clicking a link in the left navigation column.
Advanced Search
When I went to the Advanced Search page (https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/discover)
I discovered that this is the page that is automatically shown at the top of
the results screen after every search, even those done in the initial search
box. In addition to the Sort options (previously mentioned) there are dropdown
boxes for Search Scope and Filters.
The Search Scope categories correspond to the Collections to
which each item is assigned. They are:
Annual Reports & Independent Evaluations
Books
Journals
Working Papers
Economic and Sector Work (ESW) Studies
Knowledge Notes
Multilingual Content
Multiple Collections can be assigned to an item, but--this
is one of the few criticisms I have of this interface--you cannot select more
than one Collection to search at one time. The default search scope is All of
the OKR. Information about most of the Collections is available under an "I"
icon next to the collection name in the Browse portion of the left-hand panel
(not on the search form, but you can view it conveniently by opening another
browser window).
Journals includes articles published in World Bank-published
journals, but also articles published by World Bank authors in external
journals. Knowledge Notes are "short briefs (typically 4-6 pages in
length) that capture lessons of experience from Bank operations and research in
a succinct and easily digestible format (and usually reference larger works
found elsewhere in the OKR)." Multilingual Content indicates works with
PDFs in languages other than English; records are in English and therefore must
be searched only in English, but the full text of the item is often available
in a wide variety of other languages.
Filters (Title, Author, Publication Date, Topic, Region,
Keyword, and Country) are available for fielded search. Select a filter and
enter the value in the small search box to the right of the filter name. Although
there are no instructions on how to do this, some guidance is available from the
examples of records shown immediately below the search form. More guidance can
be found by examining the rich facet display for any given set of search
results. Lists of authors, publication date ranges, topics, document types,
keywords, region, and country are given; they include the numbers of matching
records within the search together with a link that lets you drill down to
limit the results.
Browse Options
Several options are available in the left column for
browsing the entire database. Clicking By Publication Date gives the oldest
items first. Currently, OKR officially contains publications back to 2005 and
will extend back to 2000 by the end of 2013. However, the annual World Development Reports is available
starting in 1978 and at least some reports go back to the early 1990s.
It is worth clicking on the Topic browse link to look
through the 600+ thesaurus terms that are applied to World Bank publications.
There are many more topics than the agriculture, education, energy, economic,
and poverty reduction terms that I expected. I became interested in Science and
Technology Development--Innovation; Private Sector Development--E-Business;
Girls Education; and Accommodation and Tourism Industry, for example.
I was surprised at the breadth of the collection of
documents I found at the Open Knowledge Repository, and I was impressed with
the ease and elegance of its interface, so much so that I am sorry that the
World Bank is not more prolific! I've read that report on Spain's development
and democracy that I mentioned earlier and was pleased to confirm impressions I
had gathered and learn more about the unlikely development of Spain as a
tourist destination under Franco. I also fell across a two-page document titled
"16 Things You Didn't Know about Africa," which quickly gave me a
much more nuanced picture of African countries. I recommend the Open Knowledge
Repository whenever you need information on international economic and
development initiatives, or cross-national comparisons in business and social
science topics. I also recommend it as a model of an internet database and of
commitment to open access.
Susanne Bjørner
provides editorial services to publishers, librarians, authors, and researchers.
Contact her at bjorner@earthlink.net or www.bjorner.info.
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