Utility of an OAI service provider search portal

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) facilitates efficient interoperability between digital collections, in particular by enabling service providers to construct, with relatively modest effort, search portals that present aggregated metadata to specific communities. We describe the experiences of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library as an OAI service provider. We discuss the creation of a search portal to an aggregation of metadata describing cultural heritage resources. We examine several key challenges posed by the aggregated metadata and present preliminary findings of a pilot study of the utility of the portal for a specific community (student teachers). We also comment briefly on the potential for using text analysis tools to uncover themes and relationships within the aggregated metadata.