The Open Archives Initiative:
A New Approach to Finding Research Materials on the Web
Libraries, archives, and other institutions are investing heavily
in digitization to make information about their collections and
material from them available to scholars and students via the
Internet. But will researchers be able to find the electronically
available resources they need?
Not easily. The limitations of commercial Internet search
engines, and the uneven quality of what they turn up, often make
it difficult for researchers to find material truly pertinent to
their projects. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is an effort
to decrease that difficulty.
Development
The OAI began in a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1999,
sponsored by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and four other
organizations serving libraries and publishers. The meeting
produced the "Santa Fe Convention," a technical framework for
metadata "harvesting," which the DLF subsequently explored for
its potential to enable researchers to locate material on their
subjects, regardless of location and format, through specialized
Internet portal services.
Additional meetings in 2000 led to a vision statement about
the convention's possibilities, a consensus in support of more
work on the convention, and the formation of an OAI Steering
Committee to oversee its development. With financing from the DLF
and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), an OAI
technical working group revised the Santa Fe Convention into what
is now known as the OAI Harvesting Protocol.
Testing
The DLF is now supporting the testing of the protocol. The OAI
Steering Committee called for a one-to-two-year period of such
experimental implementation before any further revision is made.
With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the DLF is
working with the OAI towards development of a small number of
Internet gateways through which users will be able to access
holdings from multiple libraries as if they were part of a single
collection. Four kinds of services are under discussion with
prospective Internet-access service providers.
- services that produce responses to inquiries about a
particular subject, such as Americana
- services that provide access to resources in a particular
format, such as visual documents
- services customized by one library or consortium to meet
specific needs of its patrons
- services through which one can search across available
metadata regardless of subject, format, or location of resources
that the metadata describe
To begin the testing, DLF members have agreed to contribute
metadata from nearly 60 online digital collections representing
several million unique information objects. Work is underway to
make metadata available for "harvesting" by a number of selected
harvesting services.
For more information visit our Web site,
www.diglib.org/architectures.htm,
or contact us by e-mail at
dlf@clir.org, by phone at
202-939-4750, or by post at DLF, Council on Library and
Information Resources, Suite 500, 1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW,
Washington, DC, 20036-2124.
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