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The purpose of this paper is to describe the Illinois LSTA grant‐funded project, “Yellow Brick Roads: Building a Digital Shortcut to Statewide Information”. The project investigated the feasibility of unified searching across library holdings, digitization projects, and online state government information through use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH) in tandem with the Z39.50 protocol through application of the Z39.50/OAI Gateway Profile.

The project proceeded through the construction of a metasearch service model based on the Z39.50/OAI Gateway Profile. Technical obstacles encountered during the construction of this demonstration service were noted, as were potential solutions. The evaluation of the Z39.50/OAI harvesting component of the Gateway Profile was conducted by means of a questionnaire of vendors providing Z39.50 servers to the Illinois Regional Library Systems.

The established technology platform provided by the University of Illinois Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Metadata Harvesting Project proved to be adequate to data sets of this size and character. However, the project concluded that the Z39.50/OAI Gateway Profile could not be deployed because of limitations in the functionality of typical Z‐servers.

The project concentrated on the technical aspects of building such a service model rather than on the usability of the interface or on questions of interoperability at the metadata level, such as to what extent the vocabularies used by the different metadata communities was compatible.

The project's findings indicate that more labor intensive, or less timely, processes of aggregating records than that envisaged by the Z39.50/OAI approach will continue to be necessary. However, further investigation of hybrid approaches hold promise.

In July of 2001, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign undertook a project to test the efficacy of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to construct a search and discovery service focused on information resources in the domain of cultural heritage. To date, the Illinois project has indexed over two million Dublin Core metadata records contributed by 39 metadata repositories in the museum, academic library, and digital library project communities. These records describe a mix of digital and analog primary content. Our analysis of these metadata records demonstrates wide divergence in descriptive metadata practices and the use and interpretation of Dublin Core metadata elements. Differences are particularly notable by community. This article provides an overview of the Illinois project, presents quantitative data about divergent metadata practices and element usage patterns, and details implications for metadata providers and harvesting services.

OAIster, at the University of Michigan, University Libraries, Digital Library Production Service (DLPS), is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant‐funded project designed to test the feasibility of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH) to harvest digital object metadata from multiple and varied digital object repositories and develop a service to allow end‐users to access that metadata. This article describes in‐depth the development of our system to harvest, store, transform the metadata into Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) Bibliographic Class format, build indexes and make the metadata searchable through an interface using the XPAT search engine. Results of the testing of our service and statistics on usage are reported, as well as the issues that we have encountered during our harvesting and transformation operations. The article closes by discussing the future improvements and potential of OAIster and the OAI‐PMH protocol.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors informing spousal global mobility decisions within the context of sporting expatriation. Findings contribute to the non-corporate global mobility literature as well as providing an empirical enhancement to the family relatedness of work decisions framework.

In this qualitative study, in-depth interviews gave voice to 21 spouses of professional sailors who have experienced both trailing their spouse and staying behind.

Access to empathetic social support, the potential impact on children, and the spouse’s career were all found to influence the spouse’s dynamic global mobility decision making.

The study is limited by the cross-sectional nature of the research. Future longitudinal research into the impact of spousal preferences would identify the on-going effect of their decision(s) to relocate or to stay behind.

Providing organisations with an understanding of the familial issues their global talent may factor into their work mobility decisions will allow them to implement appropriate family-focussed support, irrespective of the choice to engage, or not engage, in global mobility.

By grounding the study in the under-researched sporting arena, the author contributes to the emerging non-corporate expatriate conversation. Furthermore, the family relatedness of work-related decisions framework was found to provide a useful conceptual foundation for understanding decision making in an international context.