OAI is designed with a low-barrier technology approach, thus allowing institutions to provide content metadata with little effort. On the other hand, search capabilities are very limited on OAI data providers, and have to be provided by separate service providers. We propose that data providers form a peer-to-peer network which supports distributed search over all connected metadata repositories. Such an approach is already implemented for learning content metadata (project 'Edutella'). We describe how this technology could be reused in the OAI context. This would allow OAI repositories to provide distributed search capabilities and effortless integration of new archives within a peer-to-peer network with little additional implementation effort.
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