OAI Services Registry Reviews

I chose the following OAI Services to review:

1) OAIster http://www.oaister.org/
I think that OAIster is one of the largest OAI Services with 1034 contributing members.

2) Sheet Music Consortium
http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/
The Sheet Music Consortium is a collaboration between UC Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University and Duke University.

3) Australasian Digital Theses Program http://leven.comp.utas.edu.au/AuseAccess/pmwiki.php?n=Activity.ADTP
"The majority of Australian universities are signed up and deliver thesis metadata to the [[http://adt-beta.library.unsw.edu.au/|ADT Program gateway]] at the University of New South Wales, while in late 2005 New Zealand also agreed inter-nationally to feed theses to the Program, making it the ''Australasian'' Digital Theses Program.The gateway (holding e-thesis metadata) is harvested by Google, Google Scholar, etc."

The primary criteria for a "good" federated collection is a clear scope and useful purpose. I feel these are important qualities for both the back-end institutions so that they can maintain a manageable and practical project as well as for end-users who desire quality over quantity. I am definitely a novice in the world of harvesting, but "quality over quantity" strikes me as a adage with near universal applicability. On the other hand, OAIster is a mega-service registry. I suppose that it serves a useful function in the harvesting world as the biggest, broadest federated collection. However, I think that for every one OAIster, there should be many more digital theses and specialized format or topic collections that feed into a meta-harvester; otherwise, the balance of expertise, quality control and project management might be tipped toward a circular, 6 degrees of seperation-type phenomenon with much redundancy and little value added.