More than 5600 full-content journal articles were processed, indexed, and added to the testbed.

Principal Investigator, Timothy Cole, and Research Programmer, Thomas Habing participated in the alpha test of the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. They developed several prototype data provider interfaces which made select metadata about the local D-Lib collection harvestable. Metadata from other digital collections from the UIUC were also made available. In addition to presenting at the Open Meeting in Washington, DC, in January, we will also be making a reference implementation of the provider protocol available for free download.

Project personnel continued their involvement in the planning and execution of a test of "localizing" DOI linking in order to address the "appropriate copy" issue. Principal Investigator, William Mischo attended project planning meetings, while Research Programmer, Thomas Habing developed a simple proof of concept local resolver. This work will continue into 2001.

In concert with the OAI effort, investigations into improved metadata representation using XML were also undertaken. New metadata schemas were developed and tested. The goal of the improved metadata schemas is to better utilize various Web standards, such as the Resource Description Framework (RDF), Dublin Core (DC), and other DC associated standards, such as DC Qualified, and DC Agents. This also includes the utilization of other Web standards such as XSLT and DOM to improve the creation and maintenance of the metadata.

In addition, Research Programmer, Robert Ferrer, is investigating the use of the XML Schema language. This is both to define and validate XML metadata, but also to validate XML full-text documents, replacing the SGML DTDs which are currently used.