Web search service reveals hidden scholarly resources ANN ARBOR—An online search service designed to create access to a wide-ranging collection of digital resources geared to the academic community is now available through the University Library at the University of Michigan. The service, called OAIster (pronounced oyster), searches a repository of information that links to previously difficult-to-locate electronic scholarly resources such as the complete contents of books and articles, technical reports, preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed), white papers, images of paintings, movies and audio files of speeches.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 sometimes hidden resources by tapping directly into the collections of a variety of institutions using metadata harvester technology being developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Through a collaborative effort with UIUC, the U-M’s OAIster service provides access to more than a million harvested records describing and pointing to these resources. Currently, the resources are created and hosted by 119 research libraries and institutions from around the world. Many of the scholarly collections included in OAIster were not previously indexed in any popular Web search services and remained hidden from those who need the resources for their research. With the OAIster search tool, specific and relevant information based on the researcher’s needs is easily located. "With OAIster, researchers now have access to an index of online scholarly materials that they are unlikely to find in typical web search engines," said John Wilkin, interim associate director of Digital Library Services at the University of Michigan. "The resources are developed or collected by the hosting institution and OAIster locates the actual image or document—not just the catalog." 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; Caltech Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory Technical Reports; and many other online scholarly resources available over the Internet. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAIster uses the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol that is designed to facilitate discovery and retrieval of certain classes of scholarly works. "We are very grateful for the generous funding from the Mellon Foundation that has allowed us to develop a service that provides researchers easy access to scholarly resources," Wilkin said. "Through the project, we were able to create a tool that locates specific resources from a large and growing body of valuable and rich material needed by the academic community." Institutions interested in contributing records, or those who wish to learn more about the OAIster project, please contact Kat Hagedorn at [email protected]. For more information, or to use the OAIster service, visit the Web site at: http://www.oaister.org/