However, a separate metadata file makes it easy to provide the necessary information at one central spot. For keywords, ERPA maintains a common thesaurus to be used by all participating groups. The management board has set up an easy and informal process of amending the list of keywords if necessary. So far this feature has been used only by European Integration online Papers. The second main element of the ERPA software is the search engine, which is built on the central database that holds the two files for each paper in the Archive.
Readers enter searches on one of two Web forms.
The search result is presented in a list sorted by the date of publication, with newest papers first. It gives the authors' names, the publication date, the title of the retrieved paper, and a hyperlink to the original URL of the paper. Certainly ERPA plans on including more series. Incorporating PDF files into the Archive automatically. Today the spider is able to extract metadata only from HTML files, so PDF files have to be converted to HTML to allow the spider to work.