Case Study: University Center for International Studies achieves fast, searchable online research archives with Thunderstone Webinator

Using Webinator To Search Online Collections Of Eurasian And East European Research

The University Center for International Studies (UCIS) at the University of Pittsburgh needed an efficient way to create customized, full-text search tools for region-specific online collections, especially for its Center for Russian & East European Studies and the Vladimir I. Toumanoff Virtual Library project. The challenge was to index large amounts of scanned and digitized research material and make it searchable for a broad academic and public audience. Thunderstone’s Webinator indexing and retrieval software was used to help meet that need.

Thunderstone implemented Webinator to crawl, index, and search curated collections of Eurasian and East European content, including more than 20 years of reports and working papers for the NCEEER archive. After months of digitization, the full corpus was indexed in less than 24 hours, creating a fully searchable virtual library that updates regularly as new papers are added. Thunderstone also helped UCIS adapt the system behind a firewall and support foreign-language searching, giving UCIS a flexible, affordable, and high-ROI solution they could manage internally.

University Center for International Studies

Mark J. Weixel

Director of Informatics