29 September 2010

2 minute read

North America

Marty Courtois, repository manager at Hale Library on K-State's campus explained: "The Department of Animal Sciences and Industry has undertaken a project to deposit research papers from the entire series of Cattlemen's Day and Swine Day conferences in the K-State Research Exchange (K-REx)."

A service of the K-State Libraries, K-REx is an example of an 'institutional repository' – a place where faculty, students and staff of the university can deposit electronic versions of their articles, dissertations, research papers and other scholarly work. K-REx is organized by communities, Courtois said. The community home page for the Animal Sciences and Industry department is already available.

"Publications archived in K-REx are freely available on the web, including to the public," said Courtois, who is working with Lois Schreiner and others in the animal science department on the project. "K-REx is built on a set of standards which facilitates the exchange of information with other repositories around the world. Google and other search engines make a point of indexing all institutional repositories worldwide, and items from institutional repositories rank highly in Google searches.

"If a producer is interested in research information on dried distiller's grains, for example, he or she can enter that phrase in the search box on the Animal Sciences and Industry community page in K-REx and retrieve more than 300 papers. Users also can search by author, title or published date.

Research papers have been added dating back to 1968 from K-State’s Swine Day, and Cattlemen’s Day proceedings to 1995. Eventually, all Cattlemen's Day papers back to 1968 will be available.

For more information about K-REx, click here.

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