OAIster Update: More Access & No Conditions. In previous posts, I sought to clarify our plans for taking over the OAIster aggregation of metadata from the University of Michigan.
Since then a couple key things have changed, which are being communicated to the repositories being harvested as well as to the broader community. One of the changes is that there are no longer any “terms and conditions” regarding the metadata. In keeping with the open style of the Open Archives Initiative community, if you make your metadata available for harvesting, you must intend for it to be harvested. We will also feel free to index it, provide access to it, and allow Google to crawl it. After all, we believe that discovery and access is the whole point of opening up your metadata for harvesting. We listened to your feedback, we carefully considered your comments, and we feel that it is important enough to get this right that we are willing to make an investment in it. Related posts: What is OAI and why should you care? « ZA3038. The Open Archives Initiative, commonly abbreviated as OAI, is a “body that promotes standards in archiving which allow systems to operate successfully together and exchange information.”
(Dictionary of Information and Library Management) Founded by Michael Nelson, Carl Lagoze, and Herbert Van de Sompel, the OAI first launched in October of 1999. The Initiative’s funding comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, Digital Library Federation, Microsoft Corporation, and the National Science Foundation. (Reitz, Open Archives Initiative) Since its inception, the Initiative has been linked conceptually to the idea of open access in scholarly publishing and the creation of institutional repositories. For this reason it has garnered considerable support from information and library science professionals. The OAI’s main vehicle for increasing scholarly communication is OAI-PMH, or the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Like this:
Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Google and OAI-PMH. Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Mixing open and restricted access. Over the Christmas break I read the interesting Global Ireland: same difference.
And, in my convalescence, I have been looking at other materials on this topic. I had a look at OAIster. A search on Ireland and globablization returned quite a few results. I was interested in browsing through the results on the first page: six of the items were immediately available to me; four were not: I was directed to a publisher's splash page. Now, I had, mistakenly, thought that OAIster focused on open access material so was surprised to see this. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Following the link [not working in the extract above] about the '"freely-available" designation' brings you to the OAIster Collection Development Policy, which is admirably clear, and reasonable for a service provider in their situation.
Related entries: Mellon funded Museum Data Exchange project. You may have already seen a press release, but in case you haven’t, I’ll first give you the gist, and then some insights into the work already underway.
With the generous support of a $145,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RLG Programs will gather a select group of museum partners to accomplish the following: Creating a low-barrier / no-cost batch export capability for CDWA Lite XML out of the collections management system used by the participating museums (GallerySystems TMS)Modeling data exchange processes using the Open Archive Information Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) at the participating museumsCreating an aggregation of museum content within OCLC Research for analysisDiscussing the evidence about the relative utility of the aggregation with stakeholders from the museum, vendor and aggregator community It’s a tall order for a project with a 15 months lifespan, and that’s why we’ve already gotten started!