The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...

standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata).Open Archives Initiative -> About OAI
/ref> The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier

framework" for archives ( institutional repositories) containing digital content ( digital libraries) to allow people (service providers) harvest

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

(from data providers). Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets. OAI has been involved in developing a technological framework and interoperability

standards Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object t ...

for enhancing access to eprint archives, which make

scholarly The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about their subjects of expertise as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly pu ...

communications Communication is commonly defined as the transmission of information. Its precise definition is disputed and there are disagreements about whether Intention, unintentional or failed transmissions are included and whether communication not onl ...

academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...

s available, associated with the

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

movement. The relevant technology and standards are applicable beyond scholarly publishing. The OAI technical infrastructure, specified in the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) version 2.0, defines a mechanism for data providers to expose their metadata. This protocol mandates that individual archives map their metadata to the

Dublin Core 140px, Logo of DCMI, maintenance agency for Dublin Core Terms The Dublin Core vocabulary, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Terms (DCMT), is a general purpose metadata vocabulary for describing resources of any type. It was first developed ...

, a common metadata set for this purpose. OAI standards allow a common way to provide content, and part of those standards is that the content has metadata that describes the items in Dublin Core format. Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. Funding for the initiative came from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Digital Library Federation (DLF),

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

(NSF), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other organizations.

References

External links

*
Suleyman Demirel University Open Archives Harvester
via archive.org
Largest OAI-Harvester (OAIster)ScientificCommons.orgISIDORE : a french portal in arts & humanities based on OAI and SemWebUIUC OAI Metadata Harvesting Project
*
Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals
'
Openarchives.eu - The European Guide to OAI-PMH compliant repositories in the world
{{DEFAULTSORT:Open archives initiative Academic publishing Online archives Archival science Open-access archives Open access projects

See also

References

External links