Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 14:48:06 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends:
Yahoo! is helping the cause of Open Access. Please read what Yahoo! and the
University of Michigan are doing. I received this through another discussion
list.
Arun
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articles, technical reports, preprints (unpublished works that have not yet
been peer reviewed), white papers, images of paintings, movies and audio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 .You can view the press release at:
http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Mar04/r031004
------------------- Kat Hagedorn OAIster/Metadata Harvesting Librarian DLXS
Bibliographic Class Coordinator DLXS Text Class Co-coordinator Digital
Library Production Service University of Michigan http://www.oaister.org/
http://www.dlxs.org/ email: khage@umich.edu
