OAI for Beginners - the Open Archives Forum online tutorial
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. The Overview, History and Development of OAI-PMH, and Glossary may be used on their own to gain
information about OAI and OAI-PMH without going into technical implementation details.
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.
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