OAIster is a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. Our goal is to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone.

For assistance with the service, see our search help page, and learn more about a particular institution we are harvesting from. We are also committed to improving our service -- you can see our future plans and the progress we are making.

The novelty of our service is multi-fold:

• Our service will reveal digital resources previously "hidden" from users behind web scripts (how are they hidden?). The OAI harvesting protocol we're using makes this possible.

• There won't be any dead ends. Users will not be retrieving merely information (metadata) about resources -- they will have access to the real things. For instance, instead of just the catalog records of a slide collection of Van Gogh's works, users will be able to view images of the actual works.

• The service will provide one-stop "shopping" for users interested in useful digital resources.

• Digital resources will be easily findable and viewable through our service. The middleware we use to index these resources makes this possible.

If you're interested in making your institution's digital resources available for harvesting, please contact Kat Hagedorn.