Value-added (Academic) services

UIS RUSSIA is a collective resource for university education and research in economics, social and political sciences, international relations, intercultural communication, philology, mass media. To assist investigators and educators the system maintains the most demanded holdings and provides for additional functions - academic services.

The system (May 2004 version) integrates 60+ collections, maintains 1 200.000+ documents, 55 000+ statistical tables. Daily update is up to 1,5 Mb. Subject-oriented resources on the topics of special demand are accomplished - "Statistics on Russia", "Budget System of RF", "Elections in Russia".

The product is accomplished as an integrated resource with innovated search engine. Above traditional queries content-based search instruments are available:

• Several systems of subject headings:
  • UIS RUSSIA classificator;
  • Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress list of categories;
  • JEL (Journal for Economic Literature) classification system for articles in economics and social sciences;
  • RF GRNTI (Gosudarstvenny rubricator nauchno-tekhnicheskoi informatsii) for articles in economics and social sciences
  • SOFIST classificator for public opinion polls data is under construction.
• Thesaurus on social and political domain for navigation and query refinement.
• Special informers to assist in query refinement.

Research-assisting services include:

• Annotations complimenting full text documents;
• MS Excel format for all statistical tables, including the tables presented in analytical reports and scientific journals;
• Relational database format for most demanded statistics;
• Hyperlinks to the Methodological Notes and Glossary for statistics ;
• Visual presentation of the data retrieved;
• Map-based presentation of election results;
• Interface and search instruments in Russian for holdings in English;
• User-tailored information update in automatic mode.

Developed functionality is available due to procedures of technical and content preprocessing of data and document at front end. The work is mostly done in automatic mode by special software (converters) tailored on every collection. At first stage processing provides for:

• Data from different sources conversion into a unified format (HTML);
• Each source bibliographic processing (abridged form);
• Each document and table bibliographic processing and provider' copyright and collection bibliographic description assignment.

Next stage of automatic processing produces content-based analysis utilizing lingware -software - knowledgeware complex. It results in:

• Thesaurus-based indexing of all the documents, including statistical tables and indicators :
• Several SSH-based categorization, including JEL-based and GRNTI categorization for scientific journals' articles ;
• Annotating of some holdings' full text documents .

Additional efforts are undertaken to process statistical data. The data is converted into the MS Excel format, most demanded data is converted into relational database format. Methodological Notes are assigned and hyper linked to appropriate tables. Election results are tailed to a map. The procedures are done mostly in an automatic mode but under an operator supervision.