Planned Research Collaboration with University of Michigan

The University of Michigan Library and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library both have proposed to implement a suite of OAI-based metadata harvesting services, search services, and tools designed to facilitate discovery and retrieval of scholarly information. Two distinct metadata search services are proposed utilizing shared infrastructure components and software tools.

The University of Michigan search service would be more global in scope, providing cross-repository searching of metadata describing publicly available digital objects. The Michigan service would be relatively "lightweight" (e.g., without deduplication or thesauri) and would be designed to answer the pressing need for opening the "hidden web" information resources of the scholarly community. The proposed audience for the Michigan search service is the entire Internet community, without bounds, and we believe that its role and importance is to finally begin to reveal to a wide audience these digital library resources in a way that they are not now revealed.

The University of Illinois would develop a more vertical, domain-specific portal designed to search metadata describing manuscript archives and digital cultural heritage information resources. Metadata describing non-digital resources and resources of restricted availability would be included along with metadata describing publicly available digital objects. Best practices for revealing (via OAI) the metadata contained in EAD finding aids and other community-specific metadata schemas would be investigated. The proposed target audience for the Illinois service is the academic community of researchers and scholars interested in learning about these specific types of resources which tend to be poorly represented (or not represented) at the item level in existing comprehensive (e.g., cross-institutional) finding aids.

In addition to establishment of these search services, Illinois proposes to develop and make available tools to facilitate the creation of OAI metadata provider repositories. These tools will be developed in concert with and tested at other CIC institutions. Illinois also proposes to construct and make available for Michigan's use a middleware application that harvests OAI-compliant metadata provider sites. Michigan proposes to make available tools to help build and maintain large-scale indices of OAI harvested metadata. Each institution proposes to develop unique interface and value-added services and components. All tools and components will be made freely available, excepting only the core, underlying XPAT search engine, which can be obtained for a nominal cost by other non-profit institutions through Michigan's existing Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS).

The two institutions bring complementary experience and resources to the proposed projects. Michigan has extensive and unique experience in creation and implementation of large-scale search services, and the strength they bring is the certainty that the broad-based search service will be built and maintained, and that it will be effective. Illinois has extensive experience with the generation and transformation of metadata in many XML schemas and experience with harvesting of HTTP-based information resources. Illinois was an OAI metadata harvesting alpha test participant. Their participation will facilitate development of OAI provider sites and the harvest of the broadest possible collection of metadata. Both institutions bring extensive experience with library search interface design and a large base of academic and general library users. A multi-institutional steering committee, including members from outside the 2 institutions, will be established to help coordinate project work and insure broad applicability of project output.

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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Gateway Homepage Comments to: Tom Habing Updated on: 2/22/02 Sshreeve