Providing OAI Metadata for use in University of Illinois and University of Michigan OAI Harvesting Research Projects

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is funding seven institutions, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of Michigan, to create gateway and portal services using metadata harvesting protocols. These projects will use the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) and are part of an ongoing investigation into the viability of harvesting as a means of improving digital library interoperability. The OAI Protocol provides mechanisms for the sharing of item-level metadata across multiple metadata schemas in an automated manner. The Mellon projects will investigate the potential to use the Protocol to create services, tools, and utilities that address the need for greater semantic interoperability and easier, more comprehensive discovery of scholarly information resources.

While there exists a base of already established OAI Metadata Provider Services (e.g., Library of Congress, CIMI, OAI Metadata Provider Services at both Illinois and Michigan), we are very interested in encouraging additional sources of item-level metadata, particularly from institutions with unique and important cultural heritage resources. Availability of additional metadata resources will allow us to more fully test the viability of the OAI Protocol to enhance scholarly communication.

Sample OAI Metadata Provider Service implementations have been developed by several OAI Community members, including the UIUC Library, OCLC, and NCSA (see URLs listed at the bottom of this note). Templates of these implementations can be used as the basis for development of OAI Metadata Provider Services by institutions interested in exporting item-level metadata. Alternatively, UIUC also will accept (for initial phases of this research)“snapshots” of metadata in some other standard format (e.g.: a labeled, tab-separated data dump from a database; XML files containing metadata records; HTML files with <meta> elements containing Dublin Core metadata). In these cases UIUC will then develop a customized OAI Metadata Provider Service that will export such static collections of metadata through the end of calendar year 2002 or until such time as the owning institution is ready to implement an OAI Metadata Provider Service of their own, whichever comes first.

Item-level metadata made available (either by the owning institution itself or through a UIUC-constructed proxy service implementation) will be harvested by both UIUC and the University of Michigan, indexed, and subsequently made available for searching by end-users. The end-user search services developed will be publicly available on the Web to end-users without restrictions (i.e., anonymously), though all transactions will be logged (including all displays of metadata records). End-user search services will be available beginning in early calendar 2002 through at least the end of that year.  Obviously, any institution’s metadata records can be pulled from the publicly accessible index at any time if requested by the owning institution.  All display of metadata records will clearly indicate that the metadata is copyrighted (by the owning institution) and will link to the owning institution’s Web site for more information regarding each particular item described.  For further information about the nature of the research investigations that will be carried out using metadata provided, see text of the UIUC’s project proposal at http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/proposal.htm.

While harvested metadata will be publicly searchable by end-users without restriction, the associated OAI Metadata Provider Services are not required to be publicly accessible.  At the discretion of the institution owning each collection of metadata (and therefore the right to control access to the OAI Metadata Provider Service, whether at their site or at UIUC), harvest access can be controlled in any of the following ways:

1. IP access controlled (i.e., only harvesters connecting from specific IP addresses will be able to harvest the metadata collection).  IP addresses of UIUC and the University of Michigan would be provided and would be allowed access.  Other IP addresses would be enabled as decided by the institution(s) owning the metadata involved.

2. Publicly accessible, but not registered with any OAI registration service.  This is security through obscurity.  UIUC and the University of Michigan would know that the OAI Metadata Provider Service existed, but the service would not be registered with the main OAI Website. Provider Service availability or address information would also not be exported by UIUC or the University of Michigan.  The owning institution could of course publicize the service to others as it sees fit.

3. Publicly accessible and registered with the central OAI registration service.  This would explicitly advertise the availability of the metadata to all of the Mellon-funded harvesting projects as well as to any others interested. 

For further information please see:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/

Planned Research Collaboration with University of Michigan http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/michigan.htm

For a list of currently registered OAI Metadata Providers see: http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl

For a list of OAI Metadata Provider Tools and Resources see: http://www.openarchives.org/tools/tools.html

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact:

Joanne Kaczmarek, UIUC Project Coordinator jkaczmar@uiuc.edu     

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Gateway Homepage Comments to: Tom Habing Updated on: 12/12/01 Sshreeve