The interface is available in three languages: French, English, and Spanish. The basic search function is quite straightforward, but also offers several flexible features. Results can be sorted by relevance or format of the item. Search results can be filtered by several facets including date, language, and type of publication. Unlimited downloading is allowed, which is an advantage.

One potentially confusing effect is the wide subject range, which can yield scholarly content in the social sciences or biotechnology as well as cultural commentary. It would be useful to limit searches to particular subject areas in addition to publication types. By contrast, the CAIRN portal of French publications has specific subject collection divisions, or “bouquets”. (CAIRN also offers more journals: 256 versus the current 150 titles from Érudit).

Discoverability is supported in several ways, such as permanent urls for all articles and MARC records for the ebooks. The document repository is based on the popular DSpace platform and uses Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata dissemination; Érudit now also provides metadata to Primo and Primo Central web scale discovery tools.

Strengths and Weaknesses

This user-friendly platform built on open standards should continue to be very accessible and viable as it expands content, even though the content is only moderate currently. The commitment to integrating open access content, apparently with seamless integration, is well suited to its targeted scholarly and cultural community audiences. At the same time, this collection on its own does not seem to form a comprehensive destination for scholarly content. Holdings are spread rather thin across an unusual combination of humanities, social science, and technical subjects. In fact, Érudit's greatest strength seems to be as a standards-based platform prepared to host a variety of digital publishing. By enabling discovery of metadata in web scale tools and open archives harvesting, the resource could provide valuable supplementary content primarily in the French language.