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I’m addicted to CiteSeer. It’s one of my favorite sites on the web.

So, I got pretty excited when I saw earlier tonight that Penn State and the University of Kansas have been awarded 1.2 Million dollars to bring us the Next Generation CiteSeer.

Originally launched in 1997, CiteSeer is an online document repository which has provided public access to over 700,000 documents involving information and computer science topics. It presently receives over 1 million searches a day. While there are some fun tools to use with CiteSeer like the CiteSeer browser, there are some even more interesting plans ahead for the service.

The abstracts for the awards to the Pennsylvania State Univ University Park and University of Kansas Center for Research Inc tell us that the funding will be used to:

  • address performance and reliability in the existing system
  • provide support, research and education in the national research community interested in search, citation studies, user studies, and related areas.
  • add increased server capacity,
  • redesign the CiteSeer software,
  • develop a Web Services and open source architecture,
  • expand the collection,
  • allow researchers to learn from user and search patterns,
  • support collaborative usage, evaluation, and;
  • address sustainability.

Sounds like a great site becoming even better. I can’t wait.