Open Archives Initiative Primer DC2001 – Tokyo, October 25, 2001 Thomas Krichel Palmer School of Library and Information Science Long Island University With apologies to Carl Lagoze
Where I come from... Trained economist Early (1991) visionary of free online scholarship Creator of NetEc in 1993 Principal founder of RePEc in 1997 –Largest distributed academic DL in the world –Collection that is open for Contribution Usage –Grown to over 100 archives, over 10 partly interoperable user services
Metadata collection process Free online scholarship requires academic self- documentation Metadata is expensive to collect Building free metadata collection is difficult no established business model no established funding channels Only a collaborative effort will be succeed.
The example of eprint servers attractive building block for the transformation of scholarly communication but isolated efforts do not make for a scholarly communication system need to federate archive need to interoperate with other scholarly communication components
e-print Example: e-print accessibility e-print
Example: e-print accessibility e-print
metadata harvesting metadata e-print
metadata harvesting metadata Author Title Abstract Identifer e-print
other examples within the area of scholarly commuication already implemented in RePEc Sharing of log data between service providers Provision non-document data for document data provider personal data institutional data
core concepts in OAI 1.1 shared metadata format OAI 1.1 protocol Dublin Core HTTP based Community specific Reply XML Schema Self contained low-barrier interoperability data-provider / service-provider model metadata harvesting model parallel metadata formats
harvester / repository repositoryrepository oai protocol harvesterharvester support data harvesting data items
OAI protocol requests Supporting protocol requests: Identify ListMetadataFormats ListSets Harvesting protocol requests: ListRecords ListIdentifiers GetRecord repositoryrepository harvesterharvester service providerdata provider
HTTP encoding - requests BASE-URL >an.oa.org/OAI-script keyword arguments -->verb=ListIdentifers&set=S1 GET POST POST HTTP/1.0 Content-Length: 78 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded verb=ListIdentifers&set=S1
HTTP encoding - responses T19:30:30-04:00 &identifier=oai%3AarXiv%3A0001 &metadataPrefix=oai_dc record contents additional records response header xml namespaces response data
record oai:eg: My Example No restrictions protocol support format-specific metadata community-specific record data
selective harvesting - datestamps repositoryrepository harvest within date range record
selective harvesting - sets repositoryrepository harvest within set S1 record S2
Communication re OAI lists: subscribe via oai-general list oai-implementers list web: FAQ: mail:
Currently frozen specifications for months: stable for experimentation; not definitive minimize risk for early adopters maximize chances for future interoperability across communities revision of specifications The technical committee are working on the definitive specifications
The technical committee - Herbert Van de Sompel (British Library) - Carl Lagoze (Cornell U) - Thomas Krichel (Long Island U & RePEc) - Jeff Young (OCLC) - Tim Cole (U of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) - Hussein Suleman (Virginia Tech) - Simeon Warner (LANL & arXiv) - Michael Nelson (NASA & NACA) - Caroline Arms (Library of Congress) - Muhammad Zubair (Old Dominion U & ARC) - Steven Bird (U Penn & Open Language Archive Community) - Robert Tansley (MIT & DSpace) - Andy Powell UK (UKOLN) - Mogens Sandfaer Denmark (DTV) - Thomas SeveriensGermany - Thomas Baron Switserland (CERN) - Les CarrUK (U of Southampton) - Thomas PlaceNetherlands (Tilburg U)
Current activities Currently they are working on a list of technical issues related to the protocol A new specification is supposed to be drafted Alpha testing will start The new specification will be released shortly after that.
Thank you for your attention! Thomas Krichel Palmer School of Library and Information Science 720 Northern Boulevard Brookville NY USA