This database is freely available to the general public via the Internet.

OAIster is a union catalog that allows one-pass searching across millions of freely available Internet digital resources from open access collections from over 1,500 repositories, databases and websites (see data contributors). OAIster can be searched by title, author or creator, subject, language, or entire record. Searches can also be limited by resource type (text, image, audio, video, dataset) and sorted by title, author, date and hit frequency.

Searchable digital resources can range from a vintage advertisement of electric refrigerators (from the Library of Congress' American Memory project) to Harriet Beecher Stowe memoirs (from the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service's Making of America collection) to the latest research on nanotubes. Included are items such as:

• digitized books and articles
• technical reports
• dissertations and theses
• pre-prints and working documents
• audio, video and image files
• datasets (e.g., downloadable statistics files)

For each document, OAIster captures the descriptive information such as title and authors using standard Internet protocols for open archives. OAIster is now built and maintained by OCLC. All OAIster records are fully accessible through OCLC's WorldCat. For more information, see OCLC's product description.

Depends on source repositories.