PaMS: A component-based service for finding the missing full text of articles cataloged in a digital library

Providing access to the full text of cataloged articles is a highly desirable feature for a digital library. However, in many such systems, not all metadata records have (a direct pointer to) a corresponding full-text document. In this article, we present PaMS: a new service for finding the missing full text of articles cataloged in a digital library. This service is implemented as a software component in order to be readily deployable to existing systems. It works as a parameterized meta-search engine and allows digital library administrators to easily set up a search strategy, i.e., a list of existing search engines to be queried for the missing full text, as well as the filtering and ranking policies to be applied to the results retrieved by each search engine. We evaluate our service with respect to its effectiveness and efficiency with collections from two distinct fields: computer science and biomedical and life sciences. Our results attest the effectiveness of PaMS for finding missing full-text documents as well as other relevant material while keeping its overall execution time at a reasonable level.