Open Archives Initiative Primer

DC2001 – Tokyo, October 25, 2001

Thomas KrichelPalmer 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

e-print

e-print

e-print

e-print

Example: e-print accessibility

e-print

e-print

e-print

e-print

metadata harvesting

metadata

e-print

e-print

e-print

e-print

e-print

metadata harvesting

metadata

AuthorTitleAbstractIdentifer

e-print

e-print

e-print

e-print

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

repos i tory

oai protocol

harves ter

supportdata

harvestingdata

items

OAI protocol requests

Supporting protocol requests:• Identify• ListMetadataFormats• ListSets

Harvesting protocol requests:• ListRecords• ListIdentifiers• GetRecord

repos i tory

harves ter

service provider data provider

HTTP encoding - requests

BASE-URL -----------> an.oa.org/OAI-scriptkeyword arguments -->verb=ListIdentifers&set=S1

GET http://an.oa.org/OAI-script?verb=ListIdentifers&set=S1POST POST http://an.oa.org/OAI-script HTTP/1.0 Content-Length: 78 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded verb=ListIdentifers&set=S1

HTTP encoding - responses

<xml version=1.0 encoding=“UTF-8” ?><GetRecord

xmlns=“http://oai.namespace.uri”xmlns:xsi=“http://w3.namespace.uri”xsi:schemaLocation=“http://oai.namespace.uri

http://oai.schemaURL”><responseDate>2000-19-01T19:30:30-04:00</responseDate><requestURL>http://an.oa.org/OAI-script?verb=GetRecord

&amp;identifier=oai%3AarXiv%3A0001&amp;metadataPrefix=oai_dc</requestURL>

<record>record contents

</record>additional records

</GetRecord>

responseheader

xml namespace

s

responsedata

record<record>

<header><identifier>oai:eg:001</identifier><datestamp>1999-01-01</datestamp>

</header><metadata>

<dc xmlns=“http://purl.org/dc”><title>My Example</title>

</dc></metadata><about>

<ea xmlns=“http://www.arXiv.org/ea”<usage>No restrictions</usage>

</ea></about>

</record>

protocol support

format-specificmetadata

community-specific

record data

selective harvesting - datestamps

repos i tory

harvest withindate range

record

record

selective harvesting - sets

repos i tory

harvest within setS1

recordrecord

record

S2

Communication re OAI

• lists: subscribe via http://www.openarchives.org

• oai-general list

• oai-implementers list

• web: http://www.openarchives.org

• FAQ: http://www.openarchives.org/faq.htm

• mail: openarchives@openarchives.org

• Currently frozen specifications for 12 -18 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 Severiens Germany - Thomas Baron Switserland (CERN) - Les Carr UK (U of Southampton) - Thomas Place Netherlands (Tilburg U)

Current activities

Currently they are working on a list of technicalissues related to the protocol

A new specification is supposed to be drafted 2002-02

Alpha testing will start 2002-04

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 11548-1300

USA

http://openlib.org/home/krichel