OAIster has harvested and indexed its 10 millionth record. From today's announcement:
We live in an information-driven world-- one in which access to good information defines success. OAIster's growth to 10 million records takes us one step closer to that goal....
Popular search engines don't have the holdings OAIster does. They crawl web pages and index the words on those pages. It's an outstanding technique for fast, broad information from public websites. But scholarly information, the kind researchers use to enrich their work, is generally hidden from these search engines.
OAIster retrieves these otherwise elusive resources by tapping directly into the collections of a variety of institutions using harvesting technology based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting....
Ann Devenish, Publication Services Project Manager at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, notes that "Harvesting by OAIster is a primary 'selling point' when we talk to scientists and researchers about the visibility, accessibility, and impact of their contributions in an institutional repository....
OAIster is good news for the digital archives that contribute material to open-access repositories. "[OAIster has demonstrated that]...OAI interoperability can scale. This is good news for the technology, since the proliferation [of repositories] is bound to continue and even accelerate," says Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. As open-access repositories proliferate, they will be supported by a single, well-managed, comprehensive, and useful tool....
OAIster currently harvests 730 repositories from 49 countries on 6 continents. In three years, it has more than quadrupled in size and increased from 6.2 million to 10 million in the past year. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.
PS: Congratulations to Kat Hagedorn and everyone on the OAIster Project.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/25/2007 05:01:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
