OAI Provider Workshop
Sept 19, 2001
Grainger Engineering Library Information Center
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Presenters at the UIUC OAI Provider Workshop

Tim Cole (t-cole3@uiuc.edu) is Mathematics Librarian and Associate Professor of Library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a co-PI on the Illinois Digital Library Initiative project (DLI-1, 1994-1998) and the Illinois D-Lib Test Suite project (1998- 2001), and is now Principal Investigator for the Illinois OAI Metadata Harvesting Project.

OAI Work: The University of Illinois Library participated in the fall 2000 alpha testing of the OAI Protocols for Metadata Harvesting, developing 2 simple templates for OAI Metadata Provider Services. These templates are available at http://bolder.grainger.uiuc.edu/OAISimple1.1a/ and http://bolder.grainger.uiuc.edu/OAISimple1.1b/. In July of 2001 the University of Illinois Library was awarded a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to research and implement an OAI Metadata Harvesting Service to harvest metadata about and facilitate discovery of cultural heritage materials held by libraries and museums.Further information about this project is available at http://www.oai.grainger.uiuc.edu.

Personal Homepage: http://www.library.uiuc.edu/faculty/timcole3.htm

Joe Futrelle (futrelle@ncsa.uiuc.edu) is a Senior Research Programmer and technical lead of the Emerge project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Emerge is a NCSA effort to develop middleware components of a new distributed search infrastructure which addresses the scale and heterogeneity of scientific data. Joe Futrelle is also a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC.  

OAI Work: Cocoa (Components for Constructing Open Archives) is the Emerge Toolset for OAI and is now available in pre-alpha form from the Emerge Website. Cocoa has been used to build an OAI interface to the Missouri Botanical Garden's Tropicos database of over 1.5 million botanical specimens.  The downloadable version of Cocoa includes the Tropicos target as well as a simple target for serving metadata records from a directory. You can download Cocoa from the Emerge website.  Check the Emerge website for future documentation.  If you want to try out Cocoa now and need help please send email to emerge-help@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Please note that Cocoa requires Xerces.

Personal Homepage: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/futrelle/

Tom Habing (thabing@uiuc.edu) is a Research Programmer in the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He was involved with the Illinois Digital Library Initiative project (DLI-1, 1994 - 1998).  He is the technical lead for the Illinois D-Lib Test Suite project (1998 - 2001), and he is now an Investigator for the Illinois OAI Metadata Harvesting project.

OAI Work:  In addition to participating in the same OAI work mentioned for Tim Cole, Tom Habing has been involved with experiments in providing alternate metadata formats via the OAI protocol, including FGDC, EAD, RDF, and Qualified Dublin Core.  These include various metadata crosswalks, developing XSL Transformation scripts for converting XML files, and developing XML and RDF Schemas for these formats.

John Price Wilkin (jpwilkin@umich.edu) is the head of the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) at the University of Michigan and the Principal Investigator for the University of Michigan OAI Metadata Harvesting Project.  The DLPS is responsible for the Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) which provides the foundation and the framework for educational and non-profit institutions to fully develop their digital library collections.  See http://www.umdl.umich.edu/ and http://www.dlxs.org/ for more information about DLXS.  See http://www.dlxs.org/contacts.html for a list of current DLXS member institutions.

OAI Work: OAI metadata provider services are being added to the bibliographic class of the DLPS XPAT database management system.  This will allow institutions using XPAT to make available metadata indexed in the system via OAI Protocols for Metadata Harvesting metadata.  In July of 2001 the University of Michigan Library was awarded a grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to research and implement an OAI Metadata Harvesting Service to harvest metadata about and facilitate discovery of freely available, digital content held by libraries and other academic institutions. 

Jeff Young (jyoung@oclc.org) is a Senior Consulting Systems Analyst for OCLC’s Office of Research working on the OCLC ALMCE (Advanced Library Collection Management Environment).  The goal of ALCME is to create a set of open-source tools to seamlessly integrate the components needed to build a distributed library collection management system. These tools support such services as repository interfaces, metadata harvesting, and authority control.  See http://alcme.oclc.org/index.html for more information.

OAI work: The ALCME project has made available OAICat, an open-source OAI protocol metadata server.  OAICat can be placed on top of existing databases to turn them into OAI repositories with minimal coding effort.  OAICat is implemented as a J2EE-compliant "web application." As such, it is a servlet which can be installed into any J2EE-compliant web server (e.g. Apache's Tomcat Server).  For more information about OAICat see http://alcme.oclc.org/oaicat/index.html.  A working implementation of OAICat is ETDCat, containing thesis and dissertation records extracted from OCLC's WorldCat database. The MARC to Dublin Core conversion was done based on OCLC's CORC Service crosswalk. This same crosswalk is available from the ALCME: MARC to Dublin Core Converter Server.

Personal Homepage: http://purl.org/net/jyoung

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Gateway Homepage Comments to: Tom Habing Updated on: 8-16-01 TWC