Building Interoperable and Accessible ETD Collections: A Practical Guide to Creating Open Archives
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Building Interoperable and Accessible ETD Collections: A Practical Guide to Creating Open Archives
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a relatively new interoperability standard that is gaining much attention from existing and new digital libraries. It is currently advocated by many communities (including NDLTD, NCSTRL, and NSDL) to fulfill their metadata interoperability requirements. NDLTD, in particular, encourages ETD collections to support the OAI protocol in order to increase the visibility of ETDs and enable service providers (such as search engines) to expose content that may otherwise be hidden or difficult to locate. This tutorial is aimed at introducing individuals to the concepts underlying the OAI and the harvesting protocol, as well as providing sufficient information to allow attendees to almost immediately implement the standard on their own archives or in their own communities. Attendees will be introduced to both organizational and technical issues that need to be addressed when building new systems or extending existing systems, either in the capacity of being providers of data, users of data, or both. Wherever appropriate, references will be made to best practices and standards that have emerged in the OAI and NDLTD communities since the initial release of the protocol. Attendees also will be familiarized with tools developed within these communities to support the implementation of the protocol.
2002