The project

OpenArchives.gr is the largest portal providing a single point of access to Greek scientific digital content of high quality. It harvests the metadata of collections in Greece that are OAI-PMH compatible. Content providers are academic and research institutions, archives, libraries and scientific societies from Greece and Cyprus. Through OpenArchives.gr users can search for academic grey literature, research articles, books, conference proceedings, archives, etc, and among topics that span the science, humanities, social sciences and medicine disciplines.

For users, OpenArchives.gr provides a user-friendly single-point-of-access to digitized contents deriving from authoritative sources for their research, school and leisure projects. Users may search for content, as well as browse by types of content providers, lists of content providers and categories of content. For content providers, OpenArchives.gr offers a unique way to showcase their important digitized collections and increase their visibility, and to reach new audiences.

The service is maintained and continuously improved by the National Documentation Centre (EKT). EKT is mandated by law to collect, organize, preserve and make widely accessible the research and cultural output of Greece and its heritage. To meet these goals EKT develops a state-of-the-art grid of services and technological infrastructure -summarized at eContentEKT Pro- for content producers and also develops services to facilitate access and re-use to the digital content by end-users.

In the current, new iteration of the service, the layout has been redesigned in a more user-friendly way and new and improved search and browsing facilities are offered to facilitate discovery through the rich and diverse content.

Since 2020, the development of OpenArchives.gr is being supported by the project "National Information System of Research and Technology: Infrastructure of Aggregation, Documentation and Dissemination of Digital Content that promotes interoperability, long-term preservation and open access" (NSRF | http://www.ekt.gr/el/projects/24958)

OpenArchives.gr has two additional ways of publishing data. The Web API allows third-party applications to search for and display data aggregated here. Linked Data is a publishing approach which allows data integration and use.

EKT enriches, homogenizes and organises the aggregated content of OpenArchives.gr by developing vocabularies and advanced data mining and semantic enrichment tools. EKT has created a Vocabulary of Item Types that is published in Semantics.gr. The vocabulary is hierarchical and bilingual and is linked to the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and the semantic thesaurus DBpedia of Wikipedia. Metadata records were enriched with a separate field EKT type that holds references to the vocabulary. Depending on the collection, the enrichment is based on original values of "dc:type" or OAI set and, for special cases, of "dc:subject" or "dc:title".

EKT will continue to develop the service adding new quality content, promoting interesting collections, improving search and browsing functionalities, and the way users find, access and re-use content.

For more information and feedback you may contact us: openarchives_gr@ekt.gr