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.
