MetaBase.net: Designing Bibliographic Architectures

By Paul Fervoy, Fundación Acceso
May 2001

Acceso put a lot of thought into the structural planning of the MetaBase site (http://www.metabase.net). MetaBase is a Web site that contains the collected resources of dozens of libraries and resource centers throughout Central America. MetaBase's success depends on whether researchers use the site to access the contents of the libraries whose collection it holds. MetaBase offers the researcher access to more than 200,000 bibliographic references via a search interface. The result of the search leads to an individual bibliographic reference and information about the library that holds the reference and how to acquire the resource. Not only does the researcher benefit, but so do the libraries involved by gaining more visibility and use of their collections.

MetaBase's content type (hundreds of thousands of bibliographic records) required the use of a powerful full-text database operating behind-the-scenes. The problem with databases is that their content is usually only accessible via the search interface on the Web site and not through search engines. That is to say, in order to know what the database houses, you must know about the database and search within it. Internet users are unlikely to search for "sites that have bibliographic data", but type in the topic that they are looking for directly. As a result, sites with content accessible only through a database may never come up in regular searches and few users will ever know that such an important reference site exists.

The MetaBase designers were careful to plan the site architecture such that the content of the database was "viewable" and indexable by the major search engines. Each of MetaBase's 200,000 pages is accessible directly from outside search engines. The traffic this has created has given the exposure that MetaBase needed to be known by its target population (researchers), and as such has been successful at promoting the participating libraries. Prior to restructuring the Web site database in this way, MetaBase's content was hidden in its database and the site only received several hundred visits per day. Today MetaBase receives several thousand page visits per day, a great deal of which are generated by the major search engines that have indexed MetaBase's extensive collection (known from Web server referral reports that show the site administrator just what search engines are generating traffic and to which pages of the site).