Contents:
- 1. OAI for Beginners: Overview
- 2. History and development of OAI-PMH
- 3. Main Technical Ideas of OAI-PMH
- 4. Implementing OAI-PMH
- 5. XML Schemas and Support for Multiple Record Formats in OAI-PMH
- 6. Glossary
This tutorial is an introduction to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. The protocol has become a standard for metadata exchange. AV-archives can expose structured metadata describing the AV-objects in their collections via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata.Working through this tutorial the reader 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 necessary steps for a local implementation are described in chapter 3. Several examples of freely available and adaptable tools for implementations are presented in chapter 4. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the implementation of a Data Provider metadata set, including coverage of XML schema and how to support multiple record formats.OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP. Protocol version 2.0 dates from 2008.
Chapter 1, 2 and 6 are informative for those who need some background information on the metadata exchange protocol. The more technical chapters explain clearly how to implement OAI-PMH as a Data Provider and as a Service Provider.