In the last few months, DigitalCommons@Cal Poly has become a registered data contributor to several large‐scale digital library registries including OAIster.org, Open Archives Initiative, Scientific Commons and OpenDoar. Registering with these services provides different access points to our repository content in addition to Google and GoogleScholar. I was surprised to learn that a few of my coworkers weren’t familiar with these services – so here is a summary in a nutshell.
OAIster – http://www.oaister.org/
OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources hosted at University of Michigan. They provide access to these digital resources by “harvesting” their descriptive metadata (records). You can conduct a search by Author, Title, Subject or filetype and it will search all registered Digital Repositories and will return results. Very cool tool to use when you want to search for scholarship produced at other universities.
ScientificCommons – http://www.scientificcommons.org/
While still in beta, ScientificCommons boasts access to over 20 million scholarly items from 911 registered repositories, including the DigitalCommons@CalPoly.
OpenDOAR – http://www.opendoar.org/
OpenDOAR, managed by SHERPA, provides a directory of open access repositories around the world and allows users to search for content from within these repositories. If you are an institutional repository manager, this is a useful service to register with. As a user, this can be a powerful tool to locate scholarly content from Open Access repositories.
The University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider & Data Services Registry – http://gita.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/searchform.asp
IR managers can register their own university digital project with this registry. The site also has a list of data harvester services. Interesting to see how many other digital repositories are out there.
Open Archives Initiative – http://www.openarchives.org/
Founded by two giants in the digital library field: Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel. The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes standards to facilitate interoperability between different digital repositories. The OAI site offers a list of other registries that harvest metadata. Users cannot search content, but like the University of Illinois service, interesting to see the various digital repositories including the subject specific repositories.
There are many other registry initiatives & data harvester projects out there – many are discipline specific or are closed membership.
