Unit 10: OAI Harvesters

I chose to look at the following three OAI metadata harvester sites:

• Avano - an OAI harvester focused on aggregating published and unpublished research relating to the fields of marine and aquatic science, including peer reviewed articles, working papers, posters, cruise reports. (http://www.ifremer.fr/avano/)
• NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archives) - an OAI harvester covering the intellectual output of Norwegian university and college repositories. (http://www.ub.uio.no/nora/topic.html?siteLanguage=eng)
• Sheet Music Consortium - an OAI harvester dedicated to providing access  to and use of online sheet music collections. (http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/)

I think all three harvesters demonstrate the general pros and cons of OAI harvesters. In the plus side, they provide researchers a one-stop shopping experience by pulling together in one place and accessible via one search disparate resources on a unified subject, geographic region, etc. Potential drawbacks, however, include duplicate entries resulting from multiple repositories having copies of the same resource, frustration derived from broken or non-existent links directly to the described resource, and false impressions of being fully comprehensive resulting in missing out on relevant resources not indexed by the harvester.