2.14. Search and Browse
DSpace allows end-users to discover(找到) content in a number of(許多) ways, including:
• Via external reference, such as a Handle
• Searching for one or more keywords in metadata or extracted full-text(提取全文)
• Browsing though title, author, date or subject indices(主題索引), with optional image thumbnails
Search is an essential component of discovery in DSpace. Users' expectations from a search engine are quite high, so a goal for DSpace is to supply as many search features as possible. DSpace's indexing and search module has a very simple API which allows for indexing new content, regenerating the index, and performing searches on
the entire corpus, a community, or collection. Behind the API is the Java freeware search engine Lucene [http://
jakarta.apache.org/lucene/]. Lucene gives us fielded searching, stop word removal, stemming, and the ability to
incrementally add new indexed content without regenerating the entire index. The specific Lucene search indexes are
configurable enabling institutions to customize which DSpace metadata fields are indexed.
Another important mechanism for discovery in DSpace is the browse. This is the process whereby the user views a
particular index, such as the title index, and navigates around it in search of interesting items. The browse subsystem
provides a simple API for achieving this by allowing a caller to specify an index, and a subsection of that index.
The browse subsystem then discloses the portion of the index of interest. Indices that may be browsed are item title,
item issue date, item author, and subject terms. Additionally, the browse can be limited to items within a particular
collection or community.