OAIster - OCLC via WorldCat.org

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Introduction

see also Google scholar and Open access in Canada

Until October 30th, 2009, OAIster - http://www.oaister.org/ was a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service whose goal was to provide single point access to a growing collection of academically-oriented digital resources.

OAIster now housed by OCLC

OAIster <http://www.oclc.org/oaister/> is now completely housed at OCLC. It contains 23 million records from more than 1,100 organizations, and is now conveniently searchable at WorldCat - http://www.worldcat.org/. While still a union catalogue of millions of records and archival resources, OAIster is built by harvesting digital library collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). With considerable biomedical and scientific content, OAIster is also a rich source of grey literature for systematic reviews. The inclusion of OAIster records in WorldCat.org will benefit researchers from around the world. Providing access to digital resources via OAIster - access to unique scholarly content in many subject areas - and print records contained in WorldCat.org, OAIster will be an enormous boon to researchers (and a good resource to complement Google scholar). By 2010, OCLC plans to release a freely-accessible view of OAIster's records; access will be provided through a URL specific to OAIster. As mentioned, OAIster;s records will be indexed in WorldCat.org and integrated into its search results (and also made available to subscribers through OCLC FirstSearch).

What is searchable?

Digital resources including:

• born-digital texts
• audio files
• images
• movies
• datasets

Collections including:

• theses
• technical reports
• research papers
• image collections
• institutional repositories
• some self-archived materials

References

1. About OAIster (2009). http://www.oclc.org/oaister/
2. Hagedorn K. OAIster: a "no dead ends" OAI service provider. Library Hi Tech 2003;21(2); 170-181.
3. OCLC makes OAIster records available through WorldCat.org to ensure long-term public access to digital resources. Dublin, Ohio, USA. 30 October 2009
4. Norris M, Oppenheim C, Rowland F. Finding open access articles using Google, Google Scholar, OAIster and OpenDOAR. Online Information Review 2008;32(6):709-715.