I am having fun collecting and curating a collection of open access journals and journal articles, and a good example from my nascent collection is the European Journal of Government and Economics. See: https://distantreader.org/tmp/carrels-ojs/ejge/

The process is proving to be very entertaining. I first create a list of journal titles I want to collect. To date, there are about 2,000 titles in my list. I then use OAI-PMH to harvest/cache all of the articles from each title. At last count, there are at least 200,000 articles. I then model the collection in a myriad of ways, but mostly bibliographically, and thus, along the way, each article gets described using MARC. Finally, I programmatically write a description providing an overview of the title and its articles. Another example includes Changing Societies & Personalities. See: https://distantreader.org/tmp/carrels-ojs/csp/

The word "curation" plays a big role in this process. I curate my list of journal titles. I curate my list of stop words. I curate each collection of articles because my process is not amenable to non-English titles, broken repositories, nor collections with meager content.

From the results of this process, I can address many questions:

  * Measured in both number of articles as well as number of words,
    how big is each set of journal articles? I can then determine
    whether a given set is "big" or "small".
  
  * Is the title growing nor not, and if so, then to what degree?
    Is this title being maintained? The answers may allude to each
    title's merit.
  
  * In general, what is each journal title about, how does that
    aboutness ebb and flow over time, and what does a visualization
    of this ebb and flow look like? Thus I can learn whether or not I
    want to read the whole of a title more closely.
   
Collection building is never done, and such is true with this collection. That said, I am having a good time playing librarian. More specifically, I am playing the roles of collection developer, acquisitions specialist, cataloger, stacks maintenance person, public access librarian, and preservationist. Fun!

A third fledgling example is Economics, Law and Policy. See: https://distantreader.org/tmp/carrels-ojs/elp/

Finally, I sincerely believe our profession ought to be using OAI-PMH to a greater degree. While no protocol is perfect, OAI-PMH is rock solid stable and very well-documented. Libraries and librarians can use OAI-PMH to both provide access to local collections as well as create meaningful collections harvested from the 'Net.

If you have any questions, then don't hesitate to ask. Thanks for listening.

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Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]>
Librarian Emeritus
Hesburgh Libraries
University of Notre Dame