The paper focuses on the Web presence and visibility of Asian countries websites. The paper tries to highlight the Web presence using some webometric indicators like Internet access, webpages, number of Internet users, and link studies. The study analyzes the web presence using popular search engines like Altavista, Google, Yahoo and MSN. An attempt has also been taken to find out the Web Impact Factor (WIF) for selected Asian countries. The result shows that China (43.7%), Japan (16.7%) and India (10.4%) occupy highest web presence amongst Asian countries based on the total number of effective Internet users. China being the second highest number of Internet users having 11.8% after USA (19.7%) followed by India with 4.9% of world Internet Users and Japan is having the highest number of webpages followed by China and South Korea.

Web contents are interlinked at each other through hyperlinks. Inter-linking nature of web explores significant sources of information. In the context of exploring hyper-linking behaviour of the web and retrieving relevant information, search engines and web crawlers play a predominant role as data sources but search engines had mostly withdrawn their supports after December 2011. An attempt has been taken to evaluate search engines (Google, AoL, Bing, Yahoo!) using some criteria and found that AoL has the highest coverage among these search engines. The paper also identifies various alternative data sources to carry out webometric research. The finding of the study shows that majestic.com is a predominant and comprehensive data source among alternative data sources in webometric research.

A B S T R A C TThe paper gives an overview of open access (OA) institutional digital repositories (IDRs) in agricultural fields. The main objective is to provide free and unrestricted access to the public funded research outputs in global-scale in the domain of agricultural by developing a single window search interface as a useful tool for agricultural researchers in developing countries with special reference to India keeping in view the exorbitant cost of research output. It reports the design and development of a federated search interface, viz. AgriCat that facilitates resource sharing through extracting metadata from different OAI (Open Archives Initiative) compatible agricultural IDRs registered in OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) database.

Purpose This paper aims to provide an overview of the emergence of resource discovery systems and services along with their advantages and best practices including current landscapes. It reports the development of a resource discovery system by using the “VuFind” software and describes other technological tools, software, standards and protocols required for the development of the prototype. Design/methodology/approach This paper describes the process of integrating VuFind (resource discovery tool) with Koha (integrated library system), DSpace (repository software) and Apache Tika (as full-text extractor for full-text searching), etc. Findings The proposed model performs like other existing commercial and open source Web-scale resource discovery systems and is capable of harvesting resources from different subscribed or external sources replacing a library’s OPAC. Originality/value This discovery system is an important add-on to designing a one-stop access in place of the existing retrieval silos in libraries. This system is capable of indexing a variety of content within and beyond library collections. This work may help library professionals and administrators in designing their discovery system, as well as vendors to improve their products, to provide different library-friendly services.

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