Review of OAI service providers

My first review is the Sheet Music consortium: http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/, hosted by UCLA Digital Library Program. This site includes 4 consortium members: UC Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University and Duke University, which are listed on the bottom of the home page. They are building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the the Open Archives Initiative: Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. This program offers simple and advanced search, browse, and list virtual collections options. There are search tips under both simple and advanced search. In the list of virtual collections, most collections under public access, and a few are required a password to access. I am kind of lost when I view some collections because there are different creators and consortium members under one owner. My question is how the program defines the owner, or groups the collection. However, this website has a attractive and colorful homepage.

My second review is Australasian Digital Theses Program, which is “designed to improve access to, and enhance transfer of, the research information contained in theses by providing a full text version available from the desktop via the web.” The navigation panel is on the left side and categorized by General, activities, software and PmWiki, and subcategories under each main category. The link of Australian repositories is under activities. 38 Australian universities make the contributions to the institutional repositories, which can be accessed through each university’s website. There is a site search box on the top of the navigation panel. I like the design of each page interface, which use category name as an active hyperlink on the top of the left corner of the text page to remainder user where you are all the time.

My third review is California Digital Library -- University of California service provider. I chose it because the introduction to this site in the list of The University of Illinois OAI-PMH Service Provider Registry is concise and includes all the information user might be interest. On its collection home webpage, I found that A-Z list of CDL-licensed resources is no longer available. It should be take off from the page. CDL use Open Archives Initiative to harvest metadata for its eScholarship repositories, which includes 7,253,592 full-text downloads selected and deposited by the individual University of California units. The eScholarship repository can be browsed by campus, research unit, center,or department, Journals and peer-reviewed series, seminar series and postprints. CDL offers a neat, well organized, easy to access the website.