Internet News: Worldcat has OAIster

November 12, 2009

Worldcat has OAIster

OCLC Ingests OAIster: Pearls to Follow, by Barbara Quint , Newsbreaks (Nov 12)

OAIster has been a project by the University of Michigan to provide links to the metadata of hard-to-find electronic scholarly resources such as books, articles, technical reports, preprints, white papers, as well as some multimedia for images of paintings, movies and audio files of speeches.

"It now has more than 23 million records from more than 1,100 organizations worldwide, including digitized books and journal articles, digital text, audio and video files, photographic images, data sets, and theses and research papers."

This database has been absorbed into OCLC and is searchable through Worldcat.org along with library holdings.

"The WorldCat.org service now includes all the OAIster records. Users of the old OAIster.org site will now be automatically shifted over to an OCLC-based site (www.oclc.org/oaister). This is just the beginning, however. OCLC has also merged the content of two other open access files-ArchiveGrid and CAMIO-into WorldCat.org. In January, OCLC will launch a separate OAIster file, allowing users to reach just this repository content guide. As with WorldCat.org, the new OAIster-only file will be accessible for free. The experience gained from handling OAIster has led to improvements in the flexibility of WorldCat.org's infrastructure itself. More improvements are in the offing for OAIster from applying other OCLC features."

Newsbreaks article mentions that search engines can crawl and index this material but that the data is behind a "CGI script and that made it [difficult] for harvesting. We didn't have an API interface. It was cumbersome."

This is a fine example of Deep Web - it's on the web but not easily accessible by search engines.