OAIster, the marvellous search engine developed by the University of Michigan to cross-search the contents of thousands of institutional repositories, has been taken over by OCLC and absorbed into their WorldCat database. At the moment, there is no way to restrict your search to OAIster content and it’s very difficult to pick out OAIster records from the search results. To be fair, OCLC promise a discrete OAIster interface in January 2010, but until then, I’m afraid that it’s all a bit of a mess. If you do want to cross-search institutional repositories, I’d recommend the UK-based Intute Repository Search or the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE).

Will definitely let you know if OCLC keeps its promise in January!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:49 and is filed under Changes to services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.