U-M expands access to hidden electronic resources with OAIster

ANN ARBOR— A repository of information that provides links to previously difficult-to-locate electronic scholarly resources is widely available under a new agreement between the University of Michigan and Yahoo! Inc.

The repository—developed through Michigan’s University Library OAIster Project—is now available through Yahoo!’s Content Acquisition Program (CAP) and accessible through Yahoo! Search.

OAIster offers information that links to hidden digital resources such as the complete contents of books and articles, technical reports, preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed), white papers, images of paintings, movies and audio files of speeches.

OAIster retrieves these 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. The U-M’s OAIster service provides access to over 3 million harvested records describing and pointing to these resources. Currently, the resources are created and hosted by 267 research libraries and institutions from around the world.

Many of the scholarly collections included in OAIster were not previously indexed in popular Web search services and remained hidden from those who need the resources for their research. By enabling access through Yahoo!’s CAP program, these materials will be widely available to an international audience of scholars, students, researchers and enthusiasts.  

OAIster provides a direct link to an actual digital object—an image, book, document—not just a catalog or descriptive information. Examples of some of the collections currently available through OAIster include: the arXiv.org Eprint Archive (an archive of physics research); Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Public Domain Video Archive; Ethnologue: Languages of the World; Library of Congress American Memory Project; and Caltech Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory Technical Reports.

CAP enables Yahoo! Search to expand the breadth and depth of content users can access. In addition to the OAIster project, other participants in CAP include National Public Radio, Northwestern University, the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library, Project Gutenberg, UCLA and the National Science Digital Library.  

For more information about Michigan’s OAIster Project, visit http://www.oaister.org, or contact Katrina Hagedorn at khage@umich.edu. For more information about Yahoo! Search or the Content Acquisitions Program, contact Sumir Meghani of Yahoo! Inc. at sumir@yahoo-inc.com.