Using the OAI-PMH ... Differently

Abstract

The Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was created to facilitate discovery of distributed resources. The OAI-PMH achieves this by providing a simple, yet powerful framework for metadata harvesting. Harvesters can incrementally gather records contained in OAI-PMH repositories and use them to create services covering the content of several repositories. The OAI-PMH has been widely accepted, and until recently, it has mainly been applied to make Dublin Core metadata about scholarly objects contained in distributed repositories searchable through a single user interface. This article describes innovative applications of the OAI-PMH that we have introduced in recent projects. In these projects, OAI-PMH concepts such as resource and metadata format have been interpreted in novel ways. The result of doing so illustrates the usefulness of the OAI-PMH beyond the typical resource discovery using Dublin Core metadata. Also, through the inclusion of XSL1 stylesheets in protocol responses, OAI-PMH repositories have been directly overlaid with an interface that allows users to navigate the contained metadata by means of a Web browser. In addition, through the introduction of PURL2 partial redirects, complex OAI-PMH protocol requests have been turned into simple URIs that can more easily be published and used in downstream applications.