The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), supports the production and archiving of electronic theses and dissertations. While working with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to develop and test the metadata harvesting standard, the authors set up and actively maintain a central NDLTD metadata collection and multiple user portals. Discusses experiences in building this distributed digital library based upon the work of the OAI. (AEF)