Library Hi Tech

Timothy W. Cole

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479767

The tradition of union catalogs and similar broad-based, comprehensive bibliographic utilities and tools is one of long standing in the discipline of librarianship. As we move towards greater reliance on digital primary sources, the sharing of information about what we hold in our digital collections intuitively seems of increasing import and value as a way to organize and manage the explosion of online information resources. The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting enables effective and efficient sharing of digital metadata and is being utilized across a wide spectrum of disciplines and digital library projects. Experience to date gives reason for optimism and provides evidence and confirmation that, even as the technologies we use evolve, the intellectual framework of our tradition persists and continues to be relevant.

Carl Lagoze; Herbert Van de Sompel

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479776

The authors, who jointly serve as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) executive, reflect on the three-year history of the OAI. Three years of technical work recently culminated in the release of a stable production version 2 of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). This technical product, the work that led up to it, and the process that made it possible have attracted some favor from the digital library and information community. The paper explores a number of factors in the history of the OAI that the authors believe have contributed to this positive response. The factors include focus on a defined problem statement, an operational model in which strong leadership is balanced with solicited participation, a healthy dose of community building and support, and sensible technical decisions.

Caroline R. Arms

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310491899

The Library of Congress (LC) was an early adopter of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The protocol allows LC to make digitized historical collections available for integration into other services. The protocol was straightforward to implement and the harvesting traffic has no perceptible effect on the primary users of the American Memory project. Now that services can integrate records for cultural heritage resources from many sources, it is time to build on that experience to develop better services. How should the scarce resources available to produce metadata be deployed to most advantage to support discovery in different contexts? How might metadata harvesting be exploited to support new interfaces and enhanced navigation among related resources in digital libraries? This article starts a conversation between metadata providers and service builders by describing LC's experience and questions that have surfaced.

Michael L. Nelson; Terry L. Harrison; JoAnne Rocker

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479785

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an evolving protocol and philosophy regarding interoperability for digital libraries (DLs). Previously, "distributed searching" models were popular for DL interoperability. However, experience has shown distributed searching systems across large numbers of DLs to be difficult to maintain in an Internet environment. The OAI-PMH is a move away from distributed searching, focusing on the arguably simpler model of "metadata harvesting". We detail NASA's involvement in defining and testing the OAI-PMH and experience to date with adapting existing NASA distributed searching DLs (such as the NASA Technical Report Server) to use the OAI-PMH and metadata harvesting. We discuss some of the entirely new DL projects that the OAI-PMH has made possible, such as the Technical Report Interchange Project. We explain the strategic importance of the OAI-PMH to the mission of NASA's Scientific and Technical Information Program.

Simeon Warner

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479794

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was created as a practical way to promote interoperability between e‐print repositories. Although the scope of the OAI has been broadened, e‐print repositories still represent a significant fraction of OAI data providers. This article presents a brief survey of OAI e‐print repositories, and of services using metadata harvested from e‐print repositories using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI‐PMH). It then discusses several situations where metadata harvesting may be used to further improve the utility of e‐print archives as a component of the scholarly communication infrastructure.

Sarah L. Shreeves; Joanne S. Kaczmarek ; Timothy W. Cole

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479802

In July of 2001, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign undertook a project to test the efficacy of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to construct a search and discovery service focused on information resources in the domain of cultural heritage. To date, the Illinois project has indexed over two million Dublin Core metadata records contributed by 39 metadata repositories in the museum, academic library, and digital library project communities. These records describe a mix of digital and analog primary content. Our analysis of these metadata records demonstrates wide divergence in descriptive metadata practices and the use and interpretation of Dublin Core metadata elements. Differences are particularly notable by community. This article provides an overview of the Illinois project, presents quantitative data about divergent metadata practices and element usage patterns, and details implications for metadata providers and harvesting services.

Kat Hagedorn

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479811

OAIster, at the University of Michigan, University Libraries, Digital Library Production Service (DLPS), is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant-funded project designed to test the feasibility of using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to harvest digital object metadata from multiple and varied digital object repositories and develop a service to allow end-users to access that metadata. This article describes in-depth the development of our system to harvest, store, transform the metadata into Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) Bibliographic Class format, build indexes and make the metadata searchable through an interface using the XPAT search engine. Results of the testing of our service and statistics on usage are reported, as well as the issues that we have encountered during our harvesting and transformation operations. The article closes by discussing the future improvements and potential of OAIster and the OAI-PMH protocol.

Martin Halbert

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479820

The MetaScholar Initiative is a collaborative endeavor to explore the feasibility and utility of scholarly portal services developed in conjunction with Open Archives Initiative (OAI) metadata harvesting technologies. The MetaScholar Initiative comprises two projects, the MetaArchive and AmericanSouth projects, both funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation totaling $600,000. These two projects have created two metadata aggregation networks connecting some 24 libraries, archives, museums, and electronic text centers. Each network has an associated portal being created under the guidance of teams composed of scholars, librarians, archivists, and technologists. The MetaScholar Initiative is studying issues such as metadata normalization, alternative forms of scholarly communication through portals, and the process of facilitating smaller archival institutions in providing better access to their collections through the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The MetaScholar Initiative is based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Christopher J. Prom

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479839

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting presents one promising method by which metadata regarding archives and manuscripts can be shared and made more interoperable with metadata from other sources. Against the background of archival descriptive theory and practice, this article outlines a method for exposing deep, hierarchical metadata from encoded archival description (EAD) files and assesses some theoretical and practical issues that will need to be confronted by institutions choosing to provide or harvest OAI records generated from EAD files. Using OAI on top of existing EAD implementations would allow institutions to repurpose their data and potentially reach more users but would also accelerate the process of reengineering archival access mechanisms. Archivists and technologists using OAI with EAD must pay careful attention to the necessity of preserving archival context and provenance.

Gary Simons; Steven Bird

2003 Library Hi Tech

doi: 10.1108/07378830310479848

The Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources. The Dublin Core (DC) Element Set and the OAI Protocol have provided a solid foundation for the OLAC framework. However, we need more precision in community-specific aspects of resource description than is offered by DC. Furthermore, many of the institutions and individuals who might participate in OLAC do not have the technical resources to support the OAI protocol. This paper presents our solutions to these two problems.