STARGATE : Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit. Final Project Report

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is intended to demonstrate the ease of use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Static Repository technology, and the potential benefits offered to publishers in making their metadata available in this way This technology offers a simpler method of participating in many information discovery services than creating fully-fledged OAI-compliant repositories. It does this by allowing the infrastructure and technical support required to participate in OAI-based services to be shifted from the data provider (the journal) to a third party and allows a single third party gateway provider to provide intermediation for many data providers (journals). Specifically, STARGATE has created a series of Static Repositories of publisher metadata provided by a selection of Library and Information Science journals. It has demonstrated the interoperability of these repositories by exposing their metadata via a Static Repository Gateway for harvesting and cross-searching by external service providers. The project has conducted a critical evaluation of the Static Repository approach in conjunction with the participating publishers and service providers. The technology works. The project has demonstrated that Static Repositories are easy to create and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI Repositories have no impact on the participation of small journal publishers in OAI-based services. The problems for a service that arise out of the use of Static Repositories are parallel to those created by any other repository dealing with journal articles. Problems arise from the diversity of metadata element sets provided by a given journal and the lack of specific metadata elements for the articles' volume and issue details. Another issue for the use of publishers' metadata arise as the collection policies of some existing services only allow Open Access materials to be included in them. The project recommends that the use of Static Repositories continues to be explored - in particular as a flexible way to expose existing sets of structured information to OAI services and to create the opportunity to enhance the metadata as part of the process. The project further recommends that the publishing community consider the creation or adoption of an application profile for journal articles to support information discovery that can search by volume and issue. Significant further use of the Static Repository technology by small journal publishers will require the future creation and maintenance of a community-specific Static Repository Gateway. Further use will also require advocacy within the publishing community but might initially be most effectively kick-started through the creation of OAI repositories based on metadata held by the commercial services which publish or mediate access to electronic copies of journals on behalf of small publishers

HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

The multi-faceted use of the OAI-PMH in the LANL Repository

This paper focuses on the multifaceted use of the OAI-PMH in a repository architecture designed to store digital assets at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and to make the stored assets available in a uniform way to various downstream applications. In the architecture, the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language is used as the XML-based format to represent complex digital objects. Upon ingestion, these objects are stored in a multitude of autonomous OAI-PMH repositories. An OAI-PMH compliant Repository Index keeps track of the creation and location of all those repositories, whereas an Identifier Resolver keeps track of the location of individual objects. An OAI-PMH Federator is introduced as a single-point-of-access to downstream harvesters. It hides the complexity of the environment to those harvesters, and allows them to obtain transformations of stored objects. While the proposed architecture is described in the context of the LANL library, the paper will also touch on its more general applicability

Open archive solutions to traditional archive/library cooperation

Diaporama d\u27une intervention au 32e congrès LIBER qui s\u27est tenu à Rome du 17 au 20 juin 2003. Analyse des coopérations possibles entre bibliothèques et centres de documentation en matière d\u27archive ouverte. Analyse des problèmes et enjeux techniques

Herramientas de software para OAI-PMH

Sitio web del editor: http://www.rojaseberhard.com.co/rojaseberhard/bibliotecologia/lib_oai.htmlTanto para poner en marcha proveedores de datos como proveedores de servicios o agregadores, es importante conocer cuáles son las alternativas de software entre las que elegir. Aunque en los capítulos anteriores se dan algunas indicaciones, se ha considerado oportuno dedicar el capítulo 8, “Herramientas de software para OAI-PMH”, a elaborar una descripción de las principales aplicaciones empleadas en la actualidad. Tras una primera introducción sobre la diferencia entre software libre, software de código abierto y software propietarios, se muestran las principales herramientas de software libre empleadas para la creación de repositorios, la generación de proveedores de datos que no son repositorios en sí, la recogida de metadatos mediante recolectores y proveedores de servicios; y, por último, otras herramientas que soportan OAI-PMH. En primer lugar, se describen las principales herramientas de software para la creación de repositorios. Básicamente, todas ellas deben cumplir algunos requisitos: Soportar el flujo documental: introducción de documentos; rechazo o aceptación de los mismos por los administradores del repositorio; edición de los -metadatos sobre los recursos, etc. Ofrecer para estas acciones diferentes niveles de acceso: usuario, autor y administrador, así como permitir la creación de grupos de usuarios que tengan el mismo nivel de acceso. Crear colecciones de materiales, que puedan ser archivados en más de un formato. Permitir la navegación, búsqueda, recuperación, visualización y descarga de esos materiales. Este bloque se centra en una serie de aplicaciones que cumplen varios requisitos: soportan la última versión de OAI-PMH, la 2.0; son software de código abierto, es decir, este código es libremente modificable, y pueden ser descargadas pública y gratuitamente; permiten crear repositorios genéricos, de cualquier tipo; y son los más utilizados en su conjunto en el mundo. Estos son, por orden alfabético: Archimede, ARNO, CDS Invenio, DSpace, Fedora, GNU EPrints, MyCoRe y OPUS. A ellos se han añadido otras herramientas para usos más específicos, como ETD-db y DoKs (para tesis) o Kepler (para la creación de archivos personales). Para cada uno de ellos, se han recogido algunos datos básicos: la institución que mantiene cada repositorio, el tipo de documentos recogidos, el software necesario para su implantación, las opciones para la introducción de los registros y para su administración técnica y documental, las opciones de búsqueda y recuperación, los esquemas de metadatos empleados para la descripción documental y, si las tiene, las opciones de exportación de datos. El segundo bloque recoge otras herramientas capaces de generar proveedores de datos a partir de distintas estructuras de almacenamiento de información, como bases de datos y sistemas de ficheros XML, así como de pasarelas Z39.50. En el bloque de herramientas para la creación de proveedores de servicios, se recogen algunas iniciativas de especial interés, como Arc, de la Universidad de Old Dominion, en Estados Unidos, o PKP Open Archives Harvester, una herramienta generada por el proyecto Public Knowlegde Project (PKP) de las universidades canadienses Simon Fraser y Columbia. También se incluye la descripción de otras herramientas menos extendidas, como: Perl Harvester, Java OAI Harvester o VB OAI Harvest. El capítulo concluye con la mención de una serie de aplicaciones que también han adoptado el protocolo OAI-PMH con distintas finalidades: la monitorización de repositorios que cumplan el protocolo, extensiones para los sistemas de gestión de contenidos; herramientas para generar publicaciones en acceso abierto como revistas y actas de conferencias; y otras herramientas para permitir el acceso a repositorios estáticos o para convertir metadatos en otros formatos al formato mínimo especificado por el protocolo, Dublin Core sin cualificar

Особливості застосування протоколу OAI-PMH для зведених бібліотечних електронних каталогів

http://science.lp.edu.ua/ictРозглянуто підходи для побудови зведених бібліотечних електронних каталогів та підкреслено складність їх організації в умовах різноманітного бібліотечного програмного забезпечення та форматів даних. Показано, що протокол збору метаданих OAI-PMH, що успішно застосовний для об’єднання та поширення цифрових ресурсів, застосовується і для об’єднання бібліографічних ресурсів з бібліотечних електронних каталогів.The paper considers different models for building a union library catalogs and highlighted the complexity of their organization in a diverse library software and data formats. It is shown that Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) successfully applies for association and distribution of digital resources can be used for combining bibliographic resources from library catalogs

mSpace meets EPrints: a Case Study in Creating Dynamic Digital Collections

In this case study we look at issues involved in (a) generating dynamic digital libraries that are on a particular topic but span heterogeneous collections at distinct sites, (b) supplementing the artefacts in that collection with additional information available either from databases at the artefact's home or from the Web at large, and (c) providing an interaction paradigm that will support effective exploration of this new resource. We describe how we used two available frameworks, mSpace and EPrints to support this kind of collection building. The result of the study is a set of recommendations to improve the connectivity of remote resources both to one another and to related Web resources, and that will also reduce problems like co-referencing in order to enable the creation of new collections on demand