The lifeblood of institutional repositories: OAI-PMH
Set up an institutional repository of biomedical pre- or post-print papers, theses, or open curriculum, and you wonder: how will my content be discovered? A very elegant solution exists called OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
The original specifications for the OAI-PMH emerged from a coalition of web visionaries and programmers from both the Coalition for Networked Information and the Digital Library Federation. These partners, aided by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, established Open Archives Initiative (OAI) in October 1999 to address problems of discovery and interoperability for author self-archiving repositories .
The OAI-PMH emerged from the original OAI consortium as both a way for repositories to expose there deposited object metadata records to other servers that would harvest (or collect) the metadata descriptive records in an archive, in turn providing searching functionality for these and many other aggregated records from many archives and repositories. The metadata-based search result from a service provider provides a link back to the archive where the actual object or document is found. Because the search engine is only “light-weight” metadata records and not whole objects, the time spent searching is minimal. The full text or object is only a click away in the result list.
OAI registered service providers that provide searching of metadata records of archives and repositories include Scientific Commons, OAIster (fed into WorldCat), The Norwegian Open Research Archives (NORA), and SCIRUS.
There is a great and nearly comprehensive directory of actual archives that expose and allow harvesting of their records at the University of Illinois OAI-PMH Data Provider Registry. Among the more than 2300 registered and functional repositories, several exist for biomedicine:
- Washington University School of Medicine Digital Repository
- eResearch at Queen Margaret University
- Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library
