1. The Open Archives Initiative and OAIster: Past, Present and Future Kat Hagedorn University of Michigan Libraries April 6, 2006

2. 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!

5. 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

6. 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…

7. Why do (should) people use it?  It’s big-- over 7 million last month  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

8. One interface to rule them all?  If you don’t know this…  www.oaister.org  www.oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister  …how do you get to the content?  We consider part of our mission making this metadata as widely available as possible, so…

9.  Approached us as part of a big content appropriation push  Send them our metadata monthly-- takes them about a week to include it in the search index  For example--

10. 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 building connector for MetaLib tool  For example--

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. OAI-PMH model

15.  Data providers:  XML UTF-8 metadata records  hosted by shareware software  Service providers:  discover the data provider  harvest that metadata  transform it…  index it and make it searchable

16. Transformation tool  Remove “no digital object” records  Add normalized fields for limiting search  currently resource type normalized to 5 values: text, image, audio, video, dataset  planning on date normalization  Maps Simple Dublin Core to our own DLXS Bibliographic Class for indexing

17. System design UM harvester Record storage XSLT transformation tool BibClass indexes OAI-enabled DC records XSL stylesheets (per source type) Search interface (XPAT)

18. MODS / Aquifer portals  Only harvest Simple Dublin Core for OAIster  Experimenting with harvesting MODS

19. Why MODS?  Is the metadata standard of choice among richer, enhanced formats  Offers more focused ability to search and retrieve records  Based on MARC, but human-readable  Digital Library Federation (we’re members) is pushing for its use

20. What’d we do with MODS?  Mapping MODS to DLXS Bibliographic Class with many modifications  adding attributes-- handle display title (The quick fox…) vs. sort title (quick fox…, The)  merging fields-- nameParts  splitting out subject fields-- topical, name, geographical, hierarchical  Not all that perfect  merged fields don’t always make sense  not fully leveraging the richer fields in search

21. What else?  Added bookbag functions  Added thumbnails  Created better search interface  Next…  tackle date normalization  downloading of MODS directly from interface  port useful features and widgets to OAIster

22. Onwards…  Receive grant to work on metadata remediation…  …meaning ways to cluster and classify metadata so it is more easily searchable and browseable  And continue to work on best practices for data providers

23. Who will win?* * kidding…?

24. Questions?  Kat Hagedorn  University of Michigan Libraries  Digital Library Production Service  www.oaister.org  khage@umich.edu