Not to be confused with
OAIS, a conceptual framework for organizing archival repositories, or with the similarly named
Budapest Open Access Initiative.
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was an informal organization, in the circle around the colleagues
Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl Lagoze, Michael L. Nelson and Simeon Warner,[1] to develop and apply technical interoperability standards for archives to share catalogue information (metadata).[2][3][4][5] The group got together in the late late 1990s[6] and was active for around twenty years. OAI coordinated in particular three specification activities: OAI-PMH,[7] OAI-ORE[8] and ResourceSync.[9][10][11] All along the group worked towards building a "low-barrier
interoperability framework" for archives (
institutional repositories) containing digital content (
digital libraries) to allow people (service providers) harvest
metadata (from data providers).[12][13] Such sets of metadata are since then harvested to provide "value-added services", often by combining different data sets.[14][15][16][17]
OAI has been involved in developing a technological framework and interoperability
standards for enhancing access to
eprint archives, which make
scholarly communications like
academic journals available, associated with the
open accesspublishing movement. The relevant technology and standards are applicable beyond scholarly publishing.
The OAI technical infrastructure, specified in the
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) version 2.0,[7] defines a mechanism for data providers to expose their metadata. This
protocol mandates that individual archives map their metadata to the
Dublin Core, a common metadata set for this purpose. OAI standards allow a common way to provide content, and part of those standards is that the content has metadata that describes the items in Dublin Core format.
Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)[8] defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of
web resources.
^Van de Sompel, Herbert; Nelson, Michael L.; Klein, Martin; Sanderson, Robert (2013), Aalberg, Trond; Papatheodorou, Christos; Dobreva, Milena; Tsakonas, Giannis (eds.),
"ResourceSync: The NISO/OAI Resource Synchronization Framework", Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8092, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 488–489,
doi:
10.1007/978-3-642-40501-3_70,
ISBN978-3-642-40500-6, retrieved 2021-02-26