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I am part of a working group looking into the various possible models and architectures which might support a consortium or national approach to Institutional repositories in Ireland. My specific task at this stage is to work with a collaegue and clarify and elaborate on the pros and cons of a totally distributed model. I am currently a little bit confused as to whether there are in fact any ways of satisfactorily searching and retrieving metadata from these repositories on-the-fly, with no pre-harvesting and would welcome any feedback from those who may be doing this at present, perhaps as part of a federated search system. The literature I have to hand suggests that none of the currently popular IR packages (ePrints, DSpace etc) supports Z39.50 so I need to clarify whether this whole approach is viable at all, without any harvesting via OAI-PMH taking place. All information gratefully received. Regards, Ros Pan University College Dublin.