In order to share the digital resources built by the participating units of NDAP, the construction of a union catalog is very important. This project invites several representatives who participate in the NDAP to form the OAI test-bed team, and builds the union catalog of the national digital archives with OAI-PMH and handle system technology.

The greatest difficulty in building a union catalog is not developing the system, but consensus of the cooperating units and the format and quality of metadata. In other words, while building the union catalog the biggest trouble we meet is whether each cooperating unit is willing to put metadata on the Data Provider for the Service Provider to harvest, follow the metadata format requested by OAI, convert it into Dublin Core, and deliver data according to the XML schema. In addition, because every archive institution is still in the initial state of setting up a digital archive system, each unit's system is still unstable. This is the major factor why metadata can not be harvested easily and digital objects can not be connected successfully.

Interested parties can visit http://catalog.ndap.org.tw/System/index.jsp for detailed information.

<source: National Digital Archives Program web site>