[Oa-italia] OAIster raggiunge 10 Million di record

[Paola Gargiulo]

OAIster raggiunge i 10 milioni di record indicizzati
http://www.oaister.org/ 

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. - OAIster Reaches 10 Million Records.
http://www.oaister.org/ 

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. 

Developed at the University of Michigan's Library, OAIster is a collection 
of digital scholarly resources.  OAIster is also a service that continually 
gathers these digital resources to remain complete and fresh. As global 
digital repositories grow, so do OAIster's holdings. 

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.  These can be images, academic papers, movies and audio files, 
technical reports, books, as well as preprints (unpublished works that have 
not yet been peer reviewed).  By aggregating these resources, OAIster makes 
it possible to search across all of them and return the results of a 
thorough investigation of complete, up-to-date resources. 

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.  From their own experiences they know that a 
search using one of the popular search engines can bring back thousands (if 
not, millions) of results which will require careful and time-consuming 
screening, with no guarantee that they will ever get to the content they 
seek.  A search of OAIster, across hundreds of open and scholarly archives 
and millions of records, brings back results with the key metadata elements 
that allow for quick identification of, and easy navigation to, the content 
they seek." 

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 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. 

Scholars will find that searching in OAIster can provide better results than 
searching in web search engines.  Roy Tennant, User Services Architect at 
the California Digital Library, offers an example: "In OAIster I searched 
'roma' and 'world war,' then sorted by weighted relevance. The first hit 
nailed my topic-- the persecution of the Roma in World War II. Trying 'roma 
world war' in Google fails miserably because Google apparently searches 
'Rome' as well as 'Roma.' The ranking then makes anything about the Roma 
people drop significantly, and there is nothing in the first few screens of 
results that includes the word in the title, unlike the OAIster hit." 

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. 

For more information about University of Michigan's OAIster Project, visit
http://www.oaister.org/, or contact Kat Hagedorn at khage a umich.edu. 


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Kat Hagedorn
OAIster/Metadata Harvesting Librarian
DLXS Bibliographic Class Coordinator
Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan 

http://www.oaister.org/
http://www.dlxs.org/
email: khage a umich.edu
phone: 734-615-7618