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DSpace is able to support the OpenSearch protocol. For those not acquainted with the standard, a very brief introduction, with emphasis on what possibilities it holds for current use and future development.
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- Browser Integration: Many recent browsers (IE7+, FF2+) can detect, or 'autodiscover', links to the document describing the search engine. Thus you can easily add your or other DSpace instances to the drop-down list of search engines in your browser. This list typically appears in the upper right corner of the browser, with a search box. In Firefox, for example, when you visit a site supporting OpenSearch, the color of the drop-down list widget changes color, and if you open it to show the list of search engines, you are offered an opportunity to add the site to the list. IE works nearly the same way but instead labels the web sites 'search providers'. When you select a DSpace instance as the search engine and enter a search, you are simply sent to the regular search results page of the instance.
Flexible, interesting RSS Feeds. Because one of the formats that OpenSearch specifies for its results is RSS (or Atom), you can turn any search query into an RSS feed. So if there are keywords highly discriminative of content in a collection or repository, these can be turned into a URL that a feed reader can subscribe to. Taken to the extreme, one could take any search a user makes, and dynamically compose an RSS feed URL for it in the page of returned results. To see an example, if you have a DSpace with OpenSearch enabled, try:
Code Block # The Opensearch feature is available from the dspace.server.url [dspace.server.url]/opensearch/search?query=<your query> # e.g. https://demo.dspace.org/server/opensearch/search?query=<your query>
The default format returned is Atom 1.0, so you should see an Atom document containing your search results.
You can extend the syntax with a few other parameters, as follows:
Parameter
Values
format
atom, rss, html
scope
handle UUID of a collection or community to restrict the search to
rpp
number indicating the number of results per page (i.e. per request)
start
number of page to start with (if paginating results)
sort_by
number indicating sorting criteria (same as DSpace advanced search values
Multiple parameters may be specified on the query string, using the "&" character as the delimiter, e.g.:
Code Block https://demo.dspace.org/server/opensearch/search?query=<your query>&format=rss&scope=123456789/1e9af9bd8-aca9-4efa-8bd8-1edb5fe1ac4c
- Cheap metasearchSearch aggregators like A9 (Amazon) recognize OpenSearch-compliant providers, and so can be added to metasearch sets using their UIs. Then you site can be used to aggregate search results with others.
- When OpenSearch is enabled in DSpace, informational "link" tags will be embedded into the HTML of every page. These link tags will allow tools to easily discover the OpenSearch Service Document (`/service`) and RSS / Atom feeds. The links appear in the HTML head tag and look like this:
Code Block <link href="https://demo.dspace.org/server/opensearch/search?format=atom&query=*" type="application/atom+xml" rel="alternate" title="Sitewide Atom feed"> <link href="https://demo.dspace.org/server/opensearch/search?format=rss&query=*" type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" title="Sitewide RSS feed"> <link href="https://demo.dspace.org/server/opensearch/search/service" type="application/atom+xml" rel="search" title="DSpace">
Configuration is through the dspace.cfg
file. See OpenSearch Support for more details.
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