Open Archives Initiative XML Interface

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allows a digital repository to export metadata and data using XML. As an example the ACS Digital Library has as its OAI address: <http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/index/oai>. I registered this with the RoAR Eprints archive. By just supplying the OAI address for the digital library, the the archive system was able to extract information needed to register it.

If you just type the OAI address into a web browser you get an error message in return. An application such as the Open Archives Initiative - Repository Explorer is needed to send queries in the correct format and interpret the XML sent back. A simple example is the query for the repository to identity itself <http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/index/oai?verb=Identify>. The reply is:

Repository Name	ACS Digital Library
Base URL	http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/index/oai
Protocol Version	2.0
Admin Email	dl@tomw.net.au
Earliest Datestamp	2006-12-05T00:40:05Z
Deleted Record Handling	no
Granularity	YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ
Compression	gzip
Compression	deflate
Other Information	description: oai-identifier: scheme: oai repositoryIdentifier: acs.ojs.journals.sfu.ca delimiter: : sampleIdentifier: oai:acs.ojs.journals.sfu.ca:article/1

The request <http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/index/oai?verb=ListMetadataFormats> returns what formats the data is available in:

Prefix=[oai_dc]
NameSpace=[http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/]
Schema=[http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd]

Prefix=[oai_marc]
NameSpace=[http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/oai_marc]
Schema=[http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/oai_marc.xsd]

Prefix=[marcxml]
NameSpace=[http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim]
Schema=[http://www.loc.gov/standards/marcxml/schema/MARC21slim.xsd]

Prefix=[rfc1807]
NameSpace=[http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1807.txt]
Schema=[http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/1.1/rfc1807.xsd]

List sets <http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/index/oai?verb=ListSets> lists the publciations in the repository:

Australasian Journal of Information Systems

set description: dc: description:
Editorial

set description: dc: description:
AJIS Featured Theme

set description: dc: description:
Articles ...