OAI and OAIster Kat Hagedorn University of Michigan Libraries October 30, 2006

The oy(ai)ster and the hare  Well, if oysters had feet…  Other projects move faster (think Google)  OAI still building speed  Follows the punctuated equilibrium model… * © Johnny Hart!

Why OAIster?  And why the silly name?  Initially, wanted to build the Academic HotBot (yup, you read that right)  Essentially, a union catalog of those “objects” that couldn’t easily be spidered  Currently, have more records that link to “objects” than there are records in our OPAC

What does OAIster contain?  Harvest everything available  except obvious test repositories  Keep nearly everything  must have a digital object link  must have decent metadata  must be scholarly or informational  For example…

Library of Congress Digitized Historical Collections LOUISiana Digital Library (LDL)

Why do (should) people use it?  It’s big-- over 9.6 million  It’s varied-- contains articles, books, images of artwork, datasets, videos, audios, finding aids, manuscripts  It keeps growing-- as long as they keep paying my salary

One interface to rule them all?  If you don’t know this…    …how do you get to the content?  We consider part of our mission making this metadata as widely available as possible, so…

SRU interface  Federated search engines are “it” now-- trying to solve problem of how to search simultaneously  Perfect place for OAIster  Built SRU interface (Z39.50 deemed older tech at this point)  ExLibris built connector for MetaLib tool  For example--

OAI: what it is (finally)  Stands for Open Archives Initiative   “…develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.”  Includes a Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), i.e., what we use to fill OAIster  Consists of data providers and service providers

OAI: what it is not  OAI ≠ open access   “…defining and promoting machine interfaces that facilitate the availability of content from a variety of providers. Openness does not mean ‘free’ or ‘unlimited’ access to the information repositories that conform to the OAI-PMH.”  However, a large majority of OAIster records are available to all and sundry  Perfect opportunity-- freely sharing free stuff

OAIster and open access  We harvest a large number of open access “self-publishing” repositories, e.g.,  DSpace: 68  EPrints: 113  OJS: 21  Plus green and gold standard peer-reviewed digital object records from repositories like PLOS and arXiv

Onwards…  Working on clustering and classifying metadata so it is more easily searchable and browseable  And continue to work on best practices for data providers

Who will win?* * kidding…?

Questions?  Kat Hagedorn  University of Michigan Libraries  Digital Library Production Service  