Report on Open Archives work in progress at Virginia Tech
Introduction to the
Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
- Enable sharing of publication metadata and full-text by digital libraries
- Standardize low-level mechanisms to share contents of libraries
- Build higher-level user-centric and administrative services in meta-libraries
- Install organizational mechanisms to support the technical processes
Virginia Tech Projects
- MARC XML-DTD
- Computer Science Teaching Centre (CSTC)
- W3C Web Characterization Repository
- Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
- OAI Repository Explorer
MARC XML-DTD
- XML Transport format for US-MARC records
- Standardized metadata exchange format for traditional library services joining OAI
CSTC
- Collection of online resources used to aid in teaching of Computer Science
- Supports author submission and peer-review process
- Fully complaint with OAI
- http://www.cstc.org
W3C Web Characterization Repository
- Online database of metadata related to publications, tools and data sets dealing with Web characterization
- Project of the Web Characterization Activity working group of the World-Wide-Web Consortium
- Fully compliant with OAI
- http://purl.org/net/repository
NDLTD
- International project to support the creation, archiving and exchange of electronic theses and dissertations
- Work has begun on interoperability between Virginia Tech and partners in Germany
- Wrappers have been created to harvest data from remote sites which use other protocols
- Harvested data to be stored in a central OAI-compliant database (work in progress)
- http://www.ndltd.org
OAI Repository Explorer
- Serves as a compliancy test
- Allows browsing of open archive using only OAI protocol
- Sends requests on behalf of user, parses and checks responses and displays browsable interface
- Will detect most discrepancies in protocol
- http://purl.org/net/explorer
Future Work
- Expand NDLTD to enable interoperability among all member institutions
- Continue working on diverse data repositories like CSTC and the W3C Repository
- Build higher-level services on the existing data harvesting framework