Project BRICKS aims to build a Europe-wide distributed Digital Library in the field of Cultural Heritage. Each member organisation will run a node in the network (BRICKS node or BNode) and make its content available to the entire network. Content described in diverse Metadata standards can be searched with a unique query. Unlike other Digital Libraries, BRICKS is open and expandable, both on the organizational and the technical level. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the technical effort of joining the BRICKS network is minimal compared with the potential benefits of joining the BRICKS community. This paper focuses on the BRICKS importer component, which is based on the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). After a short overview of the architecture of the importer and an outline of OAI-PMH, we list the technical requirements of the importer give a detailed list of the steps an institution take to join BRICKS. We also present first results obtained with our importer component.

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