All OAIster! All the time!
You may have been excited when you heard that OAIster content was being indexed on WorldCat.org. The latest news is that a new site is available that only includes OAIster and its millions of metadata records.
OAIster records will continue to be indexed in WorldCat.org, of course, and will be integrated in WorldCat.org search results along with "regular" records from thousands of libraries worldwide.
What is OAIster again?
OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources hosted at the University of Michigan since 2002. Launched with grant support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAIster was developed to test the feasibility of building a portal to open-archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). In 2009, OCLC formed a partnership with the University of Michigan in order to provide continued access to open-archive collections through the OAIster database.
What does it mean for you?
Access to 23 million records for open-archive collections, contributed by more than 1,100 organizations worldwide.
On February 12, 2010 at 3:17 PM Cyril Oberlander said:
Hello Alice,
Will the Worldcat API have OAIster in it someday?
or
Will the OAIster in OCLC have it's own API?
Best wishes,
Cyril
On February 16, 2010 at 9:59 AM MJ Suhonos said:
Great! Now, is it possible to get machine (ie. API) access to the OAIster metadata on its own, as we could before it was taken over by OCLC?
On February 17, 2010 at 3:19 PM Alice Sneary
said:
Thanks for these good questions, MJ and Cyril. There are no current plans to release an OAIster-specific API right now, but we ARE looking into ways that we could limit by OAIster content through the existing WorldCat Search API. Another consideration is additional open access content available through WorldCat, such as HathiTrust. Can we create a limiter that isn't database (OAIster) specific, but would give you the ability to build an app that only shows results when it's something you can get your hands on the full content?