In the fall of 2002, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries began a project to implement institutional repositories (IRs) at a number of research libraries in Canada. An important part of this project is the pan-Canadian harvester, which was implemented in order to aggregate and search the collections of all of the participating IRs (http://carl-abrc-oai.lib.sfu.ca/). The Canadian harvester has been a valuable way of gathering information about a number of aspects of the IRs in Canada. In essence, it has become a sort of virtual ‘laboratory’ for the project. This brief paper introduces three areas in which we are using the harvester to gather information about Canadian IRs in order to monitor and improve the services being providing by these repositories.