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Executive Summary

The Open Archives Initiative is an ad hoc organization that created a protocol for organizations to share metadata. The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is being used by hundreds of organizations worldwide to share metadata with others and "harvest" or gather metadata from others. It has emerged as one of the most useful protocols for providing interoperability among repositories of digital content. To get a sense of the breadth and depth of content available via this protocol, see OAIster.org.

What It Is

The Open Archives Initiative is an ad hoc organization that has roots in various academic and research repository and digital library projects. Funding support has come from the Digital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Science Foundation. As the OAI mission statement states "The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content." The keystone deliverable is the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.

What Can Be Done With It

Organizations that have digital content they wish to share ("data providers" in OAI parlance) can make metadata descriptions available for other organizations to harvest and make available to their user communities ("service providers"). Software is available that can help organizations be data or service providers.

Data Provider Perspective
Exposing information about your content can attract more users with little investment.

Service Provider Perspective
OAI-PMH can be used to aggregate metadata from a variety of repositories and exposed to end users directly, or as part of a metasearch system or other search system.

Who Should Be Using It

Any library that wishes to make freely available resources on the web more apparent and useable to a local clientele. Harvesting is not by itself a difficult process, although it can get complicated if the metadata being harvested is not of sufficient quality or easily integratable with other collections.

More Information

OAI for Beginners - A tutorial by the Open Archives Forum

OAI Best Practices - Essential guidance for both data and service providers by the Digital Library Federation and the National Science Digital Library (NSDL)