Creating an Academic Hotbot: Final Report of the University of Michigan OAI Harvesting Project

Abstract

The University of Michigan OAI harvesting project, Creating an Academic Hotbot, concluded its work in December, 2002. The first phase involved identification of potential metadata sources and early exploration. The second phase of work involved installing and deploying the harvester software developed by the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC), and testing and collaborating with UIUC on fixes to the software. With the stabilized software, OAI-enabled repositories from various sources were harvested. A formal end-user Web interface for searching the harvested metadata was created and deployed at this point. The third phase of work involved creating and running a Web survey and intensive in-house end-user interviews to test the successes and limitations of the current search interface. The fourth phase of work involved a second round of end-user interviews, search log analysis, research into relevancy of results., and the development of a revised search interface.

OAIster can be found online at http://www.oaister.org/, with more than a million records available from over 120 sources. OAIster staff members have incorporated their software work on the interface into the DLXS distribution process, so that part of OAIster is now available through Open Source licensing and has been installed at some of the nearly thirty DLXS sites around the world. Further dissemination of UM’s software work (especially XSLT-based transformation routines) will be made available during the coming year.