Academic research into animal welfare, especially high-quality, quantitative research, is still relatively scarce, but research from areas as diverse as economics, sociology, psychology, marketing, medicine, history, political science, and even computer science can at times inform policy and priorities setting to advance animal welfare.

The nonprofit organization Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) is optimistic that the coming years will see an increase in high-quality targeted research into animal welfare, so now more than ever there is value in collecting, pruning, and organizing the research such that other researchers and implementing parties – companies, foundations, nonprofits, and government offices among them – can quickly gain an overview of it.

Just such a repository of annotated research is being maintained by the organization and is publicly accessible on its website. So far, however, it is but a list of links and abstracts organized into twelve broad categories. This form of organization is rapidly reaching its limits as the volume of research increases, the annotation detracts from the staff’s time, and the categorization aids readers less and less.

The goal of the ACE Research Library project is to provide ACE with an interface that aids the staff in entering new articles and papers and to provide the visitors of ACE’s website with powerful search and drill down mechanisms. The software will be open source and agnostic of the user so that it can be used by anyone with similar requirements on their data organization.