Yes, there are many differences between Google Scholar and OAIster but the idea of aggregating primarily scholarly materials on the open web is much older than GS. This is not a post to list all of them but CiteSeer and OAIster are two examples still online.

We just noticed that OAIster from the University of Michigan is quickly approaching 10 million entries.

OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service. Our goal is to create a collection of previously difficult-to-access, academically oriented digital resources (what are digital resources? why is the “freely-available” designation gone?) that are easily searchable by anyone.

The next update comes in a few days but as of now it’s home to 9,771,738 records from 701 institutions. Here’s a list of those institutions.

Congrats to the entire OAIster Team

Btw, CiteSeer is still going strong now with more than 700,000 entries, searchable citations, and searchable acknowledgements.

See Also: The Milestones Will Continue As Elsevier’s ScienceDirect Service Will Serve Its 1 Billionth Article Download Next Week. This site offers lots of stats including the Top25 Hottest Articles.

See Also: Database: New: Search through the OpenDOAR for repository content

See Also: InfoTrac OneFile Now Home to More than 60 million entries and HighWire Press Gets Very Close to 1.5 million Free Full Text Entries.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 2:59 am and is filed under Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digital Repositories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.