OAIster was a project of the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan University Library

University of Michigan Library

The University of Michigan University Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is one of the largest university library systems in the United States. The system, consisting of 19 separate libraries in 11 buildings, altogether holds over 9.55 million volumes, with the collection growing at the rate of...

. Its goal is to create a collection of freely available, previously difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. OAIster harvests from Open Archives Initiative

Open Archives Initiative

The Open Archives Initiative is an attempt to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives containing digital content . It allows people to harvest metadata...

 (OAI)-compliant digital libraries

Digital library

A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks...

, institutional repositories

Institutional repository

An Institutional repository is an online locus for collecting, preserving, and disseminating - in digital form - the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution....

, and online journal

Electronic journal

Electronic journals, also known as ejournals, e-journals, and electronic serials, are scholarly journals or intellectual magazines that can be accessed via electronic transmission. In practice, this means that they are usually published on the Web...

s using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

OAI-PMH is a protocol developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives...

 (OAI-PMH) protocol.

In early 2009, OCLC

OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

 formed a partnership with the University of Michigan in order to provide continued access to open-archive collections through OAIster.

Access

OAIster.worldcat.org is a freely-accessible OCLC site for searching the millions of OAIster records alone. The records will continue to be indexed in OCLC's WorldCat

WorldCat

WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

, and will be integrated in WorldCat.org search results along with records from thousands of libraries worldwide. They also will continue to be included in WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local "quick start" search results, and will continue to be available on the OCLC FirstSearch service to Base Package subscribers, providing a complement to other FirstSearch databases.

External links

• The OAIster database, OCLC

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