Technical specifications
Cairn.info adheres to current and emerging standards regarding remote access, metadata sharing, federated search, and usage statistics. Our team has also established numerous partnerships with key players in the academic publishing sector.
Accessibility
Cairn.info complies with accessibility standards for visually impaired and blind users, developed under the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).
All our interfaces meet WACG level AA.
IP recognition
Whether connecting on-site or remotely via our off-campus authentication page (where available), members of Cairn.info’s client institutions are recognized by their IP address and can access all the publications on the portal without having to log in.
Remote access
Access to our catalog is available both on-site, through automatic recognition of the institutions’ IP addresses, and remotely, via leading “reverse proxy” technologies (including EZProxy) and secure authentication systems compatible with CAS SSO or Shibboleth.
Metadata and indexing
Cairn.info provides an interface compliant with the OAI-PMH standard (oai.cairn.info), enabling compatible harvesters to automatically import all metadata in DublinCore or METS formats.
Additionally, metadata on our various publications are available in a simplified version in KBART format or via RSS feeds:
- KBART example: http://www.cairn.info/index.php?controleur=Kbart&typepub=3
- document format example: http://dedi.cairn.info/NL/ouvrages_cairn_csv.php
- RSS example: http://www.cairn.info/rss/rss_ouvrages.xml
Additional publication information (CSV file for Excel)
Viewing formats
All articles available on Cairn.info can be accessed in both HTML (web page) and PDF formats, depending on user preference:
- The online version offers the flexibility and fluidity of the web (dynamic contents tables, clickable footnotes, links to citations, suggested further reading, mobile version, etc.).
- The PDF version provides a facsimile of the print version of the journal (including identical pagination to facilitate citation).
Institutional PDF downloads
in 2023
Discovery tools
Cairn.info’s catalog is integrated into most university library “Discovery Tools,” including Primo/Alma and Summon from Ex Libris, the Ebsco Discovery Service, or OCLC’s WorldCat.
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Definition
Discovery tool is a general, centralized index composed of data from publishers, content aggregators, and local sources (catalogs, institutional repositories, digitized collections, etc.), aimed at facilitating identification and access to documentary resources provided by the institution in question. Unlike federated search, which queries several publishers’ databases simultaneously via “connectors,” a discovery tool queries a unified database.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_system_(bibliographic_search)
Federated search
Publications on Cairn.info can also be searched via most federated search tools, leveraging the simple and systematic URL structure of Cairn.info’s search engine:
https://www.cairn.info/resultats_recherche.php?searchTerm=X
where “X” is the search term.
Cairn.info is also compatible with the OpenURL protocol, allowing publications on our platform to be found via most of the link resolvers available on the market.
Statistics
Cairn.info also provides its client institutions with usage statistics for the material they make available via Cairn.info. These statistics comply with the COUNTER standard.
