Curiosity won't kill this Kat; it's her curiosity, and her passion for order, that led Kat Hagedorn to become a librarian.

There could hardly be a better job to be curious in than managing OAIster. Conceived as a kind of "Academic HotBot," OAIster provides "one-stop shopping" for scholarly digital resources that standard search engines couldn't access. It searches through nearly 5 million records from 396 digital repositories -- national libraries, scientific archives, electronic dissertation collections, institutional repositories of academic research., etc. -- that use the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol. Hagedorn admits that with all the amazing items she comes across when she does routine spotchecking of the records, she gets "sidetracked by serendipity."

And there could not be a project more in need of her talent for creating orderly systems. The extraordinarily wide range of content she rides herd over includes audio, video, photos, caricatures, sheet music, maps, journal articles, dissertations, conference presentations, datasets, lecture notes, books, and more.

At one time Hagedorn felt out of place as a librarian because she wasn't very good at the kind of on-the-fly discovery required in reference work, but that was before she realized that she was very good indeed at organizing information and providing usable interfaces for it.

Those skills flowered during her stint as lead information architect for Argus Associates, where she led projects for Fortune 500 clients including AT&T, Corning, and The Weather Channel. She says that when she started there, "I was your basic geek -- couldn't communicate well with others, couldn't present worth a damn, had few creativity skills, and no ability to convince others. Argus changed all that." Peter Morville, the CEO of Argus, says Hagedorn emerged as a real leader within the consulting group, and became "one of the most experienced and capable information architects in the world." He says Hagedorn was probably sadder than anybody in the firm when Argus closed, because "she was afraid she'd never get an interesting job again."

Then OAIster happened to her. In 2001, when the Mellon Foundation funded the University of Michigan Library's proposal, Hagedorn was hired to manage the project. She and project programmer Mike Burek worked with partners at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to test the OAI metadata harvester they were building for the project. They convinced creators of digital collections to allow OAIster to harvest them. Then they created, tested, and revised the end-user search interface. She says it was a challenge figuring it all out, and when OAIster launched in 2003, "we all breathed a sigh of relief and turned to some user testing to polish some of the rough edges."

Now that the basics of OAIster are in place, Hagedorn has time to add several new collections to the mix every month, tinker with improvements to the search interface, and make conference presentations about the project. With funding from an IMLS grant, she's also resolving some of the bigger questions associated with OAI work, like duplication of metadata records and inconsistencies in classification. What interests her even more is discovering "best practices" that all digital collections can benefit from.

In 2004, OAIster joined a partnership with Yahoo so its spiders could crawl the OAIster collections. Hagedorn says those collections now get millions of hits a day by way of Yahoo searches.

Hagedorn relaxes with gardening, film reviewing, and singing in the University Musical Society Choral Union. These hobbies aren't, she thinks, that different from her work, because "Singing is about discipline. Gardening is about order. Films are about context. I bring those qualities to my job."

The work and the woman are perfectly matched. OAIster gives free range to both her curiosity, and her passion for making order out of mess. "What better job can a person have that that," she asks, "to do what suits her best?"

Marylaine Block
Writer and Internet Librarian
http://marylaine.com