From CUNY Academic Commons

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OAI-PMH

Logo courtesy of Open Access Initiative

“The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP.”

from http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/

Harvesting from Digital Repositories

By “exposing” a digital collection’s metadata (i.e. publishing a url that can be used to access it), a repository can share its collections, as long as the metadata conforms to OAI-PMH standards. Harvestors can ingest the metadata, index it, and link to the urls that are contained within it.

For example, a web publishing tool such as Omeka can point at a OAI-PMH compliant digital collection in the Library of Congress, suck in the collection’s metadata and display it. Links to images may be clicked on via urls supplied within the metadata.

Useful Links

Related Pages