IEEE Collaborates with Access Innovations, Inc. To Engineer Re-Indexing of Xplore Digital Library

Project Improves Findability Among Over Two Million Documents

March 1, 2011 – IEEE (the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) has collaborated with Access Innovations, Inc., a leader in the data and content management industry, to complete a comprehensive re-indexing of approximately 2.1 million of the 2.8 million IEEE article records in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library database.

IEEE Xplore contains IEEE publications from 38 specialized societies and seven technical councils serving more than 400,000 members in 160 countries. IEEE publishes more than 1,300 standards and sponsored more than 1,200 conferences in 2010.

Currently, Xplore’s electronic library includes 2,828,776 documents, of which about 2.1 million (74 percent) are IEEE publications. IEEE Xplore’s additional articles come from IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology), the AIP/AVS Applied Physics Library and the IBM Journal of Research and Development.

This is the seventh major collaboration between IEEE and Access Innovations. Beginning in 2006, Access completed a six-year update IEEE’s thesaurus.

“Our long-term collaboration with Access Innovations represents a shared commitment to making our resources and the vast amount of knowledge and information IEEE has amassed over the years as accessible — and therefore as valuable — as possible to our current membership,” said Adam D. Philippidis, Manager of Indexing and Database Production for IEEE. 

To complete the latest project, Access Innovations used an implementation of Data Harmony Metadata Extractor to determine the article’s content type and then built an improved rules base to identify content types in order for each type to be indexed in a Specific way using the IEEE Thesaurus.

Using M.A.I. (Machine Aided Indexer) provided highly accurate, rules-based indexing (text categorization) of the content types. M.A.I. is part of Access Innovations’ Data Harmony suite of knowledge management products. 

Access also reviewed term usage throughout the IEEE Thesaurus. Finally, Access suggested ways to continue to improve the IEEE Thesaurus going forward by providing gap analysis to identify areas not covered specifically and term overuse reporting.

Philippidis concluded, “We appreciate the very hard work that Access staff members put in to make Xplore more searchable than ever before and to enable increased findability in the updated version of Xplore we will make available to our members.”