The open Archives initiative (OAI) is a movement, which from the desire of the operators of Preprint servers and other document server developed to make their electronic documents in the Internet discoverable. Many institutes and other mechanisms maintain data bases and servers with own publications, which are directly scanable often only on the Internet side concerned. The open Archives initiative has already 2000 XML based minutes, which develop OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which for the inquiry and transmission of meta data serves.

Contrary to for example the Z39.50 minutes, with which during a distributed search with each inquiry several host must be addressed, serve the OAI-PMH for collecting meta data, which are made available by DATA so mentioned Providern. The collected title data records are then prepared by service so mentioned Providern and made available for retrieval queries. Due to the multiplicity of meta data formats Dublin core data model is prescribed as the smallest common denominator; the extension with additional formats as for example MARC by means of MARCXML is recommended and is also practiced however.

As basic principle of OAI of many it is regarded that meta data can be passed on freely. Thus it stands in the contradiction that some OAI DATA Provider sees the commercial use of the meta data reluctantly.

The OAI-PMH can be inserted also for the transmission of other data, e.g. data to quotation ions, and by an increasing number of institutions is supported, e.g. also Internet archives.

The most important service Provider is the search machine OAIster, which opens in particular contents of the document servers.

See also

• Library
• Digital library
• Document management
• Electronic archiving
• Preprint

Related links

• http://www.openarchives.org - web page the open Archives initiative
• http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html -- Description of the OAI-PMH 2.0
• Introduction on German, 2001 pdf
• http://oai.dlib.vt.edu/cgi-bin/Explorer/oai2.0/testoai - Repository Explorer for testing DATA Providern
• http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~etdunion/cgi-bin/index.pl - OAI catalog (service Provider) for theses among other things

Service Provider

• OAIster
• further see http://www.openarchives.org

Articles in category "Open Archives initiative"

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Related Websites

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