The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication has launched its public beta site for its open access repository, DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard). It’s available at http://dash.harvard.edu.

You can search the site by keyword or you can browse by community. There are two communities available at the moment — Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Harvard Law School. Harvard Law School has about 64 items at this writing compared to over 1400 for the Arts and Sciences.

I did a search for politics and got 357 results. The results ranged from a 1991 article, The Politics of the Estranged Poor, to a pre-peer-reviewed article that actually won’t come out until 2010, International Adoption: The Human Rights Position. Search results are default-sorted by relevance but can also be sorted by title, submit date, and issue date.

Click on the title of a search result item for more detail, including abstract, a link to the published version, cite-able link, author information, and citation. Of course there’s a link to the full article as well; all the ones I saw were in PDF format.

I saw an RSS link, but when I looked at it, it seemed only to be a feed for getting information on the latest materials added to DASH. That’s fine now, but could easily get overwhelming as more communities are added to the site. If ever an archive screamed for keyword-based RSS feeds…..

There are something less than 1600 items in the repository now, though I found plenty to browse through with my keyword searching. If you want more, however, be sure to go back to the DASH front page to find links to more collections, like HMScholar and the Open Collections Program.