2. University of Michigan’s OAI Metadata Harvesting Project Kat Hagedorn OAIster Librarian, UM May 12, 2002

3. The OAIster Project One-year Mellon grant project to test the feasibility of making OAI-enabled metadata for digital objects accessible to the public Digital Library Production Service at UM began work in December 2001 Publicized as OAIster in February 2002

4. Project Highlights Any audience Any subject matter Any format Freely accessible No dead ends One-stop shopping …retrieving the “hidden web”

5. Progress to Date Communication and collaboration with other OAI data and service providers Installation and testing of UNIX harvester built by UIUC Harvesting of metadata from close to 50 institutional repositories Development of draft user interface Testing of this interface, and of user finding methods

7. Survey Testing Results Potential users interested in finding online journals and reference materials over other kinds of digital resources Multiple comments about the difficulty of searching for information, in particular not knowing where to start looking Surprisingly, a number of respondents (5%) indicated that they were generally successful in finding resources online Caveat: 45% of respondents were librarians

8. Next Steps Index transformed metadata Further analysis of user testing Refinement of interface based on what we’ve learned from testing Rollout of Phase I service Test again… Plan for Phase II…

9. Issues We’ve Encountered Protocol elements Intellectual property Scalability of service Authoritative resources Granularity / specificity Consistency / normalization

10. Varied Service Providers Focus on high usability Focus on all content available Some increased functionality (e.g., de- duplication, integration of thesauri) for other Mellon grant service providers DP-9 OAIster Ad hoc Usability Content someall high low UIUC, Emory, etc.

11. After the First Year More advanced searching Grouping to aid browsing Collaboration with other services: search, instructional… OAI evangelism

12. Contact Info Kat Hagedorn University of Michigan Libraries Digital Library Production Service khage@umich.edu 734-647-8000 http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/