The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner, to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata).Open Archives Initiative -> About OAI
/ref> The group got together in the late late 1990s and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE and ResourceSync. All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader defi ...

framework" for archives (

institutional repositories An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...

) containing digital content (

digital libraries A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital m ...

) to allow people (service providers) harvest

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

(from data providers). Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets. OAI has been involved in developing a technological framework and interoperability standards for enhancing access to

eprint In academic publishing, an eprint or e-print is a digital version of a research document (usually a journal article, but could also be a thesis, conference paper, book chapter, or a book) that is accessible online, usually as green open access, w ...

archives, which make

scholarly The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about the subject as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. It is the me ...

communications like

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...

s available, associated with the

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

publishing Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

movement. The relevant technology and standards are applicable beyond scholarly publishing. The OAI technical infrastructure, specified in the

Protocol for Metadata Harvesting The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-P ...

(OAI-PMH) version 2.0, defines a mechanism for data providers to expose their metadata. This

protocol Protocol may refer to: Sociology and politics * Protocol (politics), a formal agreement between nation states * Protocol (diplomacy), the etiquette of diplomacy and affairs of state * Etiquette, a code of personal behavior Science and technolog ...

mandates that individual archives map their metadata to the

Dublin Core 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

, a common metadata set for this purpose. OAI standards allow a common way to provide content, and part of those standards is that the content has metadata that describes the items in Dublin Core format.

Object Reuse and Exchange The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. The OAI-ORE specification implements the ORE Model which introduces the resource map (ReM) that mak ...

(OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of

web resource A web resource is any identifiable resource (digital, physical, or abstract) present on or connected to the World Wide Web.< ...

s. Funding for the initiative came from the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City in the United States, simply known as Mellon Foundation, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, and endowed with wealth accumulated by Andrew Mellon of the Mellon family of Pitts ...

Coalition for Networked Information The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization whose mission is to promote networked information technology as a way to further the advancement of intellectual collaboration and productivity. Overview The Coalition for Network ...

(CNI),

Digital Library Federation The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) that brings together a consortium of college and university libraries, public libraries, museums, and related institutions with the stated ...

(DLF),

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

(NSF), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and other organizations.

See photos

Analytical Sciences Digital Library The Analytical Sciences Digital Library (ASDL) was founded in 2001 as one of several digital libraries in the National Science Digital Library, funded by the National Science Foundation. The library is a collection of peer-reviewed electronic resou ...

(ASDL) *

Digital preservation In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and ...

National Digital Library Program The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year p ...

(NDLP) *

National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) of the United States was an archival program led by the Library of Congress to archive and provide access to digital resources. The program convened several working ...

(NDIIPP) *

Scientific Commons ScientificCommons was a project of the University of St. Gallen ''Institute for Media and Communications Management''. The major aim of the project was to develop the world’s largest archive of scientific knowledge with fulltexts freely accessib ...

Self-archiving Self-archiving is the act of (the author's) depositing a free copy of an electronic document online in order to provide open access to it. The term usually refers to the self-archiving of peer-reviewed research journal and conference articles, as ...

E-Theses Online Service E-Theses Online Service (EThOS) is a bibliographic database and union catalogue of electronic theses provided by the British Library, the National Library of the United Kingdom. EThOS provides access to over 500,000 doctoral theses awarded by ...

EThOS a service provided by the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

using OAI *

World Wide Molecular Matrix The World Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM) was a proposed electronic repository for unpublished chemical data. First introduced in 2002 by Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues in the chemistry department at the University of Cambridge in the United ...

(WWMM)

References

External links

*
Suleyman Demirel University Open Archives Harvester
via archive.org
Largest OAI-Harvester (OAIster)ScientificCommons.orgISIDORE : a french portal in arts & humanities based on OAI and SemWebUIUC OAI Metadata Harvesting Project
*
Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals
'
Openarchives.eu - The European Guide to OAI-PMH compliant repositories in the world
{{DEFAULTSORT:Open archives initiative Academic publishing Online archives Archival science Open-access archives Open access projects