1	The Open Archives Initiative: a low-barrier framework for interoperability Carl Lagoze Computing and Information Science Cornell University lagoze@cs.cornell.edu
2	Interoperability Trade-offs
3	The Open Archives Initiative The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. … The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials. OAI Mission Statement
4	OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) The goal of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting … is to supply and promote an application-independent interoperability framework that can be used by a variety of communities who are engaged in publishing content on the Web. The OAI protocol … permits metadata harvesting.
5	OAI-PMH: A simple two party model for sharing structured information
6	Yes, its about resource discovery over distributed collections
7	Facilitating/Monitoring Longevity of Distributed Content
8	Personalization of Content
9	Cross-Repository Reference Linking
10	Brief History of the OAI Motivation: expand impact of ePrint archives through federation 1999: Santa Fe Meeting and convention 2000: OAI-PMH formation Scope broadens OAI steering committee 2001 OAI-PMH v. 1.0 “experimental” protocol 2002 OAI-PMH v. 2.0 “stable” protocol
11	OAI-PMH Key technical features Deploy now technology – 80/20 rule Simple HTTP encoding Foundation of established XML standards Multiple metadata formats Repository partitioning (sets) Selective harvesting (sets and dates) Clean partition between core and implementation-specific extensions Multiple item-level metadata Collection level metadata
12	OAI Verbs Identify – repository characteristics ListMetadataFormats – DC required ListSets – repository paritioning ListRecords – (selectively) harvest metadata ListIdentifiers – (selectively) harvest metadata identifiers GetRecord – known item retrieval
13	Measures of Success Registered data providers Adoption by major projects Acceptance as ‘fundamental infrastructure’ for research and implementation
14	OAI Registered Data Providers
15	National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Very large scale distributed digital library 1,000,000 users 10,000,000 items 100,000 collections Large institutional and funding commitment $25M+ funding Over 80 collaborating institutions Technical infrastructure builds on OAI-PMH foundation Aggregation and dissemination of metadata http://www.nsdl.org
16	Fundamental Infrastructure Eprints.org servers e.g., Cal Tech ePrint framework Open language archives community JISC FAIR awards Mellon OAI service providers ECDL , DCADL, JCDL research papers
17	Some questions remain Is OAI-PMH really low-barrier infrastructure? NSDL experience indicates that significant barriers remain Utility of core metadata (unqualified DC) NSDL and other experience raises doubts Utility outside of resource discovery Certification, Reference linking, etc.
18	Future Questions and Directions “Standardization”? De-facto? Maintenance agency? Formal standards agency? Future OAI-PMH versions? Expanded functionality? Targeted ‘application profiles’? ePrints community?