The 'Long Tail' of technology information

TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/ aggregates content from a large number of different databases containing technology-related content. A search of TechXtra will search across more than 4 million records of various kinds – articles, technical reports, digital theses and dissertations, books, eprints, news items, job announcements, video, learning & teaching resources, key websites, and more – most of which relate to technology subjects. TechXtra therefore has a ‘Long Tail’, and its getting longer!

TechXtra aggregates, so that you don’t have to. From the one TechXtra search box, you can currently search 29 databases. If you need them, there are easy links to the native interfaces of these 29 databases. Hits from searches are shown by database, so you can scan their content. Sometimes this is useful, and sometimes not (we’re working on more options). If you want, you can restrict searches to a particular format (technical reports, or articles, or books, and so on), or two selected databases using the Advanced Search option.

TechXtra recently added three more databases to its cross-search:

Australian Digital Theses (ADT) (details of, and links to the full text of about 8,000 digital theses);

DiVA, technology subset (an archive containing details of doctoral and undergraduate theses and research reports from 15 of Nordic universities);

Open Video Project, a small repository of digitized video.

In the majority of cases, the full text of items found through TechXtra is freely available. This includes the 8,000 Australian theses mentioned above, nearly half a million articles in computer and information science from CiteSeer, items found via ARROW (Australian Research Repositories Online to the World), thousands of eprints from arXiv in mathematics and computer science, 300 earthquake engineering technical reports from Caltech Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory Technical Reports, many articles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), theses and dissertations from NDLTD, resources from around 30 institutional open archives in the United Kingdom, learning resources from the National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS), and more. We’ll shortly be adding graphics which will give a visual indication of the likelihood of being able to click-through to the full text.

Sometimes, materials found via TechXtra are not available in full text, or are only available if you, or your institution, subscribes to the service, or via pay-per-view.

In addition to the cross-search, TechXtra provides a number of other useful services, some of which have recently been expanded.

Numerous new feeds have been added to the OneStep News service http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/onestepnews/ giving this wider coverage of breaking industry news. The new feeds are from: PRWeb, AZoM Materials/Engineering News, NASA Breaking News, MIT News, EETimes News, ENCMag.com News, and Automotive World News, and more.

Over 5,000 news items are currently listed.

The coverage of OneStep Jobs, http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/onestepjobs/ which gives access to the very latest new job announcements has also been increased. New sources include: Total Jobs, TipTopJobs, IrishDev.com Jobs, 4ConstructionJobs.co.uk, and Eluta.

Over 7,000 new jobs are currently listed.

For those who’d like to subscribe, free, to numerous trade magazines, white papers and surveys, TechXtra has a Magazine Subscription section http://techxtra.tradepub.com/ All titles are free to professionals who qualify.

Sample titles include:
Hydrocarbon Processing http://techxtra.tradepub.com/free/hp/ (petrochemicals and refining)
circuitnet http://techxtra.tradepub.com/free/ctn/ (electronics manufacturing)
energybiz http://techxtra.tradepub.com/free/ebiz/ (power industry)
Waste Management World http://techxtra.tradepub.com/free/wmw/
There are also links (Xtra Extras) to newsletters of interest in technology information, a design data search service, a bookstore, and an Offshore Engineering Information service.

Some more features will shortly be added.

Here's what David Bradley, Science Writer, wrote about TechXtra:
http://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/grabbing-the-long-tail-of-search-engines.html
Here's what Karen Blakeman wrote about TechXtra:
http://www.rba.co.uk/rss/2006/08/techxtra-now-independent.html
TechXtra is a freely available service, developed at Heriot Watt University in the UK. We receive no external funding for its development, so we rely on word of mouth to spread the word. I hope you may help, and tell your colleagues about TechXtra, or blog about the service, or place a link to it from your websites.