Clifford Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information
Daniel Greenstein
Director
Digital Library Federation
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory – Research Library
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the OAI program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of both the type of content and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials.
Under the auspices of CNI and the Digital Library Federation participants in the OAI have been defining and experimenting with an interoperability architecture based on metadata harvesting. The goal is to provide an easy way for data providers to expose their metadata and for service providers to access that metadata and use it as input to value-added services. As the current phase of the project approaches completion, this session will provide an update — including information about Version 2 of the metadata harvesting protocol.