OAIster

OAIster, part of the Digital Library Production Service of the University of Michigan University Library, is a catalog of academically-oriented digital materials from around the world, including digitized books and articles, born-digital texts, audio files, images, movies, datasets. OAIster compiles or "harvests" the descriptive metadata of digital materials on a weekly or monthly basis in order to aggregate these records into one repository so that they are easily searchable and findable.

The records are for freely accessible digital materials, as well as restricted-access digital materials. Data contributers must have metadata available in Dublin Core format. As of February 1, 2008, OAIster provides access to 14,900,092 records from 934 contributors.

OAIster's homepage is user-friendly and includes links for searching and how to use the system. Searching is fairly basic and straight-forward: you can search for records by title, author/creator, subject, or language, or entire record. You can also further limit your search by one more more type(s) of resource, i.e. text, image, audio, video, or dataset, and you have the option to sort your results by by title, author, date, weighted hit frequency, and hit frequency.

Once you begin a search and retrieve your results, OAIster will sort them by data contributer, i.e. from where they were harvested, and will also allow you to revise your search for fewer recrods. One weakness of their search function is that you cannot search only by resource and/or date (ex: image, 2001) -- you must include a search term or name or phrase.

OAIster treats search queries of two or more words as a phrase, and will only retrieve records which contain all of the words next to each other. They are working on an initiative to employ Google-like searching so that words entered together are searched together and separately. I think this could facilitate more access to resources and materials for people who might not know exactly what they are looking for.

OAIster attempts to provide links to all of the digital resources for which is has harvested records, along with rights and access information in the catalog record for each item. You can save a record in your bookbag so you can come back to it later. The bookbag option also allows you to email or download the record.

The major limitation to OAIster is its requirement that contributors use the Dublin Core metadata format. Despite that, I think OAIster is a useful database not just for students and scholars, but also for users who are just browsing to see what digital material is out there. This is a good start in attempting to collect information from a wide variety of institutions and archives, and I look forward to seeing how OAIster continues to develop and improve upon this goal.