It is with great pleasure that I preface these proceedings for the Workshop on Applicationsof Metadata Harvesting in Scholarly Portals: Findings from the MetaScholar Projects:AmericanSouth and MetaArchive. This event marks the conclusion of two projects fundedby the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance the understanding of metadataharvesting and scholarly communication. These projects were conjoined in 2001 to formthe MetaScholar Initiative, an ongoing research collaboration based at Emory Universityinvolving librarians, scholars, archivists, curators, and technologists. Now concluding,these projects have successfully led to many findings that have informed the planning fornew endeavors that the MetaScholar Initiative is now undertaking.Our goals in organizing this workshop have been: to include presentations of researchfindings by participants in the projects; to provide a forum for scholars involved in theprojects to discuss development of the portals for scholarly communication and research;to discuss future development of the resulting portal systems; to introduce newMetaScholar Projects now underway; and to examine the value of the OAI and other opensource systems in the academic community
