Kat Hagedorn
OAIster Librarian, Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan
Beth Sandore
Associate University Librarian for Information Technology Planning & Policy
University of Illinois
Martin D. Harbert
Director, Library Systems
Emory University
The Libraries of the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Emory University have received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement a suite of OAI-based metadata harvesting services, search services, and tools designed to facilitate discovery and retrieval of scholarly information. Two distinct metadata search services are being developed utilizing shared infrastructure components and software tools that will be made available under an Open Source Initiative license.
The University of Michigan search service, called OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/), is under development by the Digital Library Production Service (http://www.umdl.umich.edu/.) It is intended to be global in scope, providing cross-repository searching of metadata describing publicly available digital objects. The Michigan service is relatively “lightweight” (e.g., without duplication or thesauri) and is being designed to answer the pressing need for opening the “hidden web” information resources of the scholarly community. The University of Illinois has developed a vertical, domain-specific portal designed to search metadata describing manuscript archives and digital cultural heritage information resources (http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/) Metadata describing non-digital resources and resources of restricted availability is included along with metadata describing publicly available digital objects. At Emory University, two grant projects — AmericaSouth.org and MetaArchive.org — have been collaboratively conjoined and are being carried forward in cooperation with partner institutions SOLINET and ASERL.