Tracking Institutional Data Assets Using OAI-PMH

This master's paper explores the impetus for data stewardship policies and guidelines and describes an empirical study conducted to assess the feasibility of employing OAI-PMH as a tool to enable institutions to track data stewardship activities. Quantitative analyses of Dublin Core metadata harvested from twelve data-specific repositories were used to make conclusions about the current state of OAI-PMH implementation, to consider ways in which the unique properties of scholarly domains and their data might be reflected in metadata values, and to suggest steps repositories can take to enable the development and implementation of a federated index of distributed data records as a tool to support the sustainability of the research enterprise