Old:Open Archives Initiative

STATUS: This page describes a separate project that is relevant to Dryad. This page is outdated and of historical use only.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) “…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.”

There are two areas of primary activity:
 * OAI-PMH, a protocol for harvesting data from a repository
 * OAI-ORE, a method for fine-grained interaction between repositories (still in development)

When most people say "OAI", they mean "OAI-PMH".


 * Currently there are over 1300 registered OAI conforming repositories.


 * List of those who provide services based on metadata that is harvsted using the OAI metadata harvesting protocol

Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, and from National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-9817416


 * OAI for Beginners (Tutorial)
 * Best Pracitices for OAI-PMH providers


 * OAI Repository Explorer: The OAI Repository Explorer useful for interactive exploration and validation of OAI respositories.


 * OAI Tools: These are tools implemented by members of the Open Archives Initiative community. These tools are made available free of charge and without guarantee as to their correctness. Questions about each tool should be directed to the individual implementer.

Carl Lagoze (see also: National Science Digital Library (NSDL)  (NSF-funded) “…to provide organized access to high quality resources and tools that support innovations in teaching and learning at all levels of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education.”)

“Mr. Lagoze’s achievements include the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which he co-created with Herbert Van de Sompel. This initiative promotes interoperability standards for metadata harvesting, with the specific goal of enhancing the ability to access all forms of digital material. The project has lead to renewed interest in shared metadata and the increased ability of scholars to locate relevant digital assets regardless of geographical location.

Carl Lagoze and Sandy Payette co-invented the Flexible and Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora). This project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with prior support from the National Science Foundation, and is being co-developed by Cornell University and the University of Virginia. Fedora is open source software for creating digital object repositories which allow the accessing of content through a distributed and dynamic infrastructure. Fedora plays an important role in the creation of digital and institutional repositories and is being used or adapted in various academic and corporate settings.

The Distributed Interactive Extensible Network Server for Technical Reports (Dienst) was co-invented by Carl Lagoze and James Davis. Dienst is both a protocol and software that were freely distributed for non-commercial use. While Dienst was an early effort in using metadata, the web and distributed content servers, it proved to be instrumental in further developments in these areas.”


 * See also: arXiv: “Open access to 626,224 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology”