A presentation from Ari Rouvari and Ere Maijala – seemingly tireless developers from the National Library of Finland where they work on MetaLib.
MetaIndex is a product to build index into MetaLib – it harvests metadata from other resources, and creates a searchable index on a central server. However, from the users perspective, it is just another federated search target for MetaLib to search.
It relies on the OAI-PMH to harvest metadata, and you can use it when you can’t do a federated search using a standard protocol (like z39.50, or SRU/SRW)
Some examples of it in use are DOAJ and E-LIS, Electra, E-thesis local collections, Music collection of Pirkanmaa Polytechnic.
In Finland they have a Nation wide unlimited license to for MetaIndex, so they can create as many as they want. However, they found that they had to be managed centrally.
Overall, they have found the MetaIndex an extremely powerful, and felt that the importance of OAI-PMH and the ability to create indexes is comparable to OpenURL and SRU in terms of impact and importance.