Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Online scholarly publishing is revolutionizing scholarly communication, and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) is among those protocols leading the way in the transformation process. OAI enables access to Web-accessible material by harvesting (or collecting) the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. Through a series of case studies, Cole and Foulonneau guide the reader through the process of conceiving, implementing and maintaining an OAI-compliant repository. Its applicability to both institutional archives and discipline based aggregators are covered, with equal attention paid to the technical and organizational aspects of creating and maintaining such repositories.