Dear Colleagues,

The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL, www.cerl.org) has set up a project for developing a federated search facility for manuscripts. One of the options now being worked on is using the technique of harvesting through the OAI protocol. In order to make a recommendation on how to proceed after the project phase I would like to know a bit more about how many manuscripts databases (both with and without images) support harvesting through OAI. I am hoping you could help me with this. Those of you involved with manuscript databases I would like to ask the following three questions: - do you support searching by Z39.50 or SRU, or harvesting through OAI? - what kind of material does your database contain (period, spatial coverage, number of records)? - might you, in principal, be interested in taking part in an international federated search facility?

I thank you in advance for your input in this small investigation, best wishes,

Liesbeth Oskamp

_______________________________________ Liesbeth Oskamp Consortium of European Research Libraries Prins Willem-Alexanderhof 5, 2595 BE Den Haag Postbus 90407, 2509 LK Den Haag The Netherlands Tel. +31 (0)70 314 0377 Fax +31 (0)70 314 0633 E-mail: Liesbeth.Oskamp@cerl.org Website: www.cerl.org