This tutorial is an introduction to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Originally developed as a means for metadata dissemination of preprint and e-print servers, OAI-PMH has become a widely known solution to connecting distributed electronic repositories of many kinds, and owes much of its acceptance to its simplicity and the comparatively very low costs of its implementation. Working through this tutorial you will: gain an overview of the history behind the OAI-PMH and an overview of its key features; achieve a deeper technical insight into how the protocol works; learn something about some of the main implementation issues; find some useful starting points and hints that will help you as an implementer.
Acknowledgements
This tutorial is based on the tutorials given in conjunction with the second and third Open Archives Forum workshops. They were prepared and presented by
Uwe Müller of Humboldt University Berlin and Andy Powell of UKOLN at University of Bath (Lisbon, December
2002), and Uwe Müller of Humboldt and Pete Cliff of UKOLN
(Berlin, March 2003). Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael Nelson, and Simeon
Warner first developed many of the slides used in the presentation of those tutorials, and
their contributions are gratefully acknowledged. Good graphics and parts of presentations
have been shared generously throughout the Open Archives Initiative community, and the
developers of this tutorial would like to thank anyone whose original work has turned up
here without our knowledge of the original source.
Open
Archives Forum (and hence the original development of this tutorial) was funded
for two years from October 2001 through September 2003 as an accompanying measure
within the Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme, a theme of the
European Union's Fifth Framework Programme managed by the Information Society
Directorate-General of the European Commission.
| Copyright © 2003 University of Bath. All rights reserved.
Author: Leona Carpenter (co-ordinating author) for OA-Forum and UKOLN |
Last modified: 3 Sep 2003 13:49 Authored in CALnet |