OAIster Kat Hagedorn University of Michigan Libraries September 12, 2007

Outline Brief history/overview of OAI Why OAIster was created OAIster: digital union catalog EPrints, open access and OAIster Google (and others) and OAIster

What is OAI? OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative “…develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.” Probably should have been called SAI: Shared Archives Initiative Includes a Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), i.e., what we use to fill OAIster Consists of data providers and service providers

Metadata records Data providers use protocol to share their metadata records Service providers harvest the metadata so they can provide a service using them Metadata needs to be XML1.1 compliant UTF-8 enabled Sufficient for discovery

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

Why OAIster? Initially, wanted to build the Academic HotBot (now we would say the Academic Google) Essentially, a union catalog of digital objects that often can’t be roboted or spidered Currently, have more records that link to “objects” than there are records in our OPAC: 13+ million

What does OAIster contain? Pre-prints, post-prints, published articles, grey literature, scanned images, archival videos… Harvest everything available except obvious test repositories Keep nearly everything must have a valid digital object link must have decent metadata must be scholarly or informational

Library of Congress Digitized Historical Collections University of Michigan Digital Collections

Why do (should) people use it? It’s big-- will pass 14 million shortly It’s varied-- besides articles, photos, and videos, it contains datasets, audio files, finding aids, manuscripts… It keeps growing-- as long as they keep paying my salary

EPrints in OAIster Kept pace with EPrints movement Currently actively harvest 138 EPrints repositories (another 18 are inactive) All told, 190K+ records A word about repository discovery…

EPrints in OAIster Not a drop in the bucket, when consider that EPrints is less than a decade old Don’t forget that OAIster contains more than records pointing to full-text And it also doesn’t point to only open access materials

Restricted materials Effort needed to partition restricted from freely accessible Often, full-text objects are embargoed, but not reflected in metadata Also felt not providing restricted materials could be a disservice

Benefit of EPrints in OAIster All valid records in one place Actively checked and re-harvested Inclusive search, so end-users retrieve associated and serendipitous materials

When use OAIster, when Google? Google vs. everything else Google can’t get at everything, until it starts using OAI itself (DSpace aside) Google contains junk, OAIster rarely does (anymore) Most importantly, we use metadata, Google doesn’t

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