OAIster (The OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative, which also refers to their metadate collection protocol.) is a search engine that utilizes data harvesting software to find internet resources - specifically to harvest metadate from digital collections all over the world. OAIster, while not directly connected to the Open Access movement, certainly supports similar principles. Currently, OAIster can only access something like 15,622,344 records from 950 separate contributors. While they may not realistically be able to compete with giant for-profit search engines, that as never their ultimate goal, and they're certainly a useful resource.
OAIster as originally the result of a Mellon grant given to the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champagne. The grants as specifically "to establish a broad, generic retrieval service for information about publicly available digital library resources provided by the research library community." Ultimately they've succeeded admirably, making them the best attempt at comprehensive digital reference I've seen, not counting the dubious charms of Wikipedia. Right now OAISter can find not only digitized and digital created texts, but also images, sound, and videos. OAIster's mission is to eliminate dead and useless links and to be a comprehensive academically oriented digital research one stop.
Currently the only problem with this is the software itself. The search functionality will be familiar to anyone who's ever tried to use an online reference library, but typing in a search word or phrase with high numbers of search results will hang the system for minutes at a time, at least on my laptop.
The only other problem I have with OAIster is similarly of execution, not intent. OAIster is very much oriented toward the academic. The problem
is in the gap between free and restricted access materials. OAIster makes no bones about their desire to make public all records regardless to their restriction with in the resource from which they were harvested. They point out in their collection policy that to filter resources usually requires a lot of extra effort on their part, and thus the burden of marking those falls to their contributors, not them.
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