EXCHANGING METADATA
OAI: Open Archives Initiative
About the OAI: Open Archives Initiative
The Open Archives Initiative makes it possible to share metadata and assets between organizations, agencies and institutions maintaining a variety of media management and library information systems. The goal of OAI is to promote standards of interoperability for data sharing. There are two main projects at OAI...
- OAI-PMH: OPEN ARCHIVES INITIATIVE PROTOCOL FOR METADATA HARVESTING
- Implements interoperability through metadata exchange
- Is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability
- Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH
- Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata
- OAI-PMH enables a content provider to share metadata with other information systems through a process called "Harvesting"
- OAI-PMH enables an aggregation of metadata records from various providers to be searched by users
- OAI-ORE: OPEN ARCHIVES INITIATIVE OBJECT REUSE AND EXCHANGE
- Defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources
- The aggregations (compound digital objects) combine distributed resources with multiple media types (text, images, data, video, audio, etc.)
- Enables users to discover and reuse resources that may otherwise never be juxtaposed into novel content aggregations
- Supports authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse and preservation of resource aggregations
OAI and PBS DLL
Both OAI and PBS DLL support educational endeavors and scholarship by making it possible to describe media items through standardized metadata and to make them shareable across disparate information and asset management systems.
At the present time, the PBS Digital Learning Library is focusing its efforts on building the core infrastructure of its respository and the interoperability between the central repository and the many PBS stations and content producers it serves.
Compatibility with OAI harvesting has been requested by numerous content providers affiliated with the PBS DLL. In the near future, look to this web page for further information about data translation and transformation capabilities in order to enable harvesting of PBS DLL metadata through the OAI protocols.