NDLTD, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, supports and encourages the production and archiving of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). While many current NDLTD member institutions and consortia have individual collections accessible online, there has until recently been no single mechanism to aggregate all ETDs to provide NDLTD-wide services (e.g., searching). With the emergence of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), that has changed. The OAI’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a robust interoperability solution that defines a standard method of exchanging metadata. While working with the OAI to develop and test the metadata harvesting standard, we have set up and actively maintain a central NDLTD metadata collection and multiple user portals. Member sites are encouraged to contribute to this central archive by supporting the OAI protocol, along with particular standards and conventions that have been specifically devised to support ETDs. We discuss in this article our experiences in building this distributed digital library based upon the work of the OAI
