This project is developing and implementing a set of metasearch gateway services for the distributed NSDL community that use broadcast search technologies to provide access to selected scientific and engineering publisher full-text repositories, abstracting and indexing services, university institutional repositories, open access full-text journal and report sites, and NSDL Pathways projects. As a component of the NSDL Core Integration services the gateways provide custom federated search access to critical distributed information resources that support the instructional and research needs of middle school, high school, undergraduate and graduate students, and faculty. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its use of standards-based frameworks such as the NISO MXG (Metasearch XML Gateway) framework, the OpenSearch 1.1 standard, and the Open Archives Initiative protocols for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) and object reuse and exchange (OAI-ORE). In addition the project team features a collaboration of information science researchers with personnel from the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer project and an international component involving two Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded initiatives in the United Kingdom: the PerX project at Heriot-Watt University and the CREE project headquartered at the University of Hull. The latter connections speak to the broader impacts of this project on the global educational digital libraries environment. The use of standards-based approaches also facilitates this broader impact.
