OAI 11/20/07

What I’ll cover What is OAI, and why it was developed How it’s used How it works The records themselves: examples How you can use it 11/20/07

What is OAI? Began in 1990 as a method for sharing open access repositories Started by the folks who run (ran) arXiv OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative “…develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.” 11/20/07

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THIS kind of sharing 11/20/07

THIS kind of sharing On one side are those who have resources they want to share: data providers On the other side are those who would like to use resources offered: service providers 11/20/07

Examples of data providers Deep Blue: as a DSpace implementation DLPS/DLXS collections: home-grown MBooks: home-grown And over 1000 more… (over 500K records just from UM alone) Deep Blue: http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/dspace-oai/request?verb=Identify DLPS/DLXS: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/b/broker20/broker20/?verb=Identify MBooks: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify 11/20/07

Examples of service providers OAIster: all OAI repositories OpenDOAR: open access repositories BASE: scientific repositories CARL/ABRC: Canadian repositories Sheet Music Consortium BASE: http://base.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/index_english.html CARL: http://carl-abrc-oai.lib.sfu.ca/ Sheet Music: http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic/ 11/20/07

OAI-PMH Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Designed to be simple to implement Consists of 6 verbs Data provider software ranges from turnkey solutions to home-grown tools 11/20/07

The verbs Identify: will tell you about the data provider, give context, indicate if conforms to aspects of the protocol ListMetadataFormats: simple Dublin Core is required (oai_dc), others are encouraged ListSets: how has the data provider categorized their records? 11/20/07

The verbs ListIdentifiers: if you’re interested only in accessing the OAI identifiers ListRecords: if you want all the records GetRecord: if you want only one record Notice the resumptionToken and completeListSize attribute 11/20/07

Harvesting Harvester software is used to retrieve the records shared by the data provider Majority of harvesters are open-source and non-proprietary UM Libraries has built its own, soon to be provided via SourceForge written in Perl, open-source, Unix platform 11/20/07

What’s out there to harvest? All subjects and formats Some repositories are “good” and some not so good-- check with me! XML errors incorrect UTF-8 encoding Around 400 repositories provide MARC in one flavor or another 11/20/07

Texts Pre- and post-prints Digitized books Journals arXiv: site, harvest Digitized books Project Gutenberg (through Internet Archive): site, harvest Journals Entomotropica (PKP system): site, harvest DOAJ: site, harvest (descriptions), harvest (articles) 11/20/07

Images By location By collection (in the library sense) PictureAustralia: site, harvest Cleveland Memory (ContentDM system): site, harvest By collection (in the library sense) U. Utah (also ContentDM): site, harvest 11/20/07

Datasets Geographic Atmospheric Census Pangaea: site, harvest NCAR: site, harvest Census Counting California: site, harvest 11/20/07

Primary source Manuscripts Papyri and ostracon MADID: site, harvest Papyri and ostracon Giessen: site, harvest Also repositories containing records detailing physical artifacts, specimens 11/20/07

How to use these records? Put in the OPAC Add to electronic journal lists Create a brand-new database of materials accessible via SRU or OpenURL for a federated engine 11/20/07

Google This stuff might be in Google, but if scholarly why not aggressively collect and provide access to it here? IMO: Getting resources like this into Google Scholar will happen…eventually 11/20/07

End result? 11/20/07