What’s New in OAI-Compliant Repositories

First, some background. The Open Archives Initiative is a project to share the resources held in digital libraries. It defines a format for describing information about digital resources — articles, images, sounds, recordings, or virtually anything else — so that the holdings of various repositories can be easily shared among institutions. There are dozens of repositories, and hundreds of thousands of resources, in OAI-compliant digital collections.
The Ockham Initiative builds tools based on the vast (and growing) universe of resources described by OAI. One of these resources, just released, is a search tool that provides an RSS feed of the search results in addition to the static view within the web interface.
As an example, here’s an RSS feed for an OAI search for RSS. Now this is a straight keyword search, so it pulls down some false positives (it turns out that “RSS” is a common acronym in other subject fields), but several clearly useful items are returned.
This is a great way to highlight otherwise hard-to-find resources on almost any topic.