Arc: an OAI service provider for cross-archive searching

ABSTRACT

The usefulness of the many on-line journals and scientific digital lib raries that exist today is limited by the lack of a service that can federate them through a unified interface. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) is one major effort to address technical interoperability among distributed archives. The objective of OAI is to develop a framework to facilitate the discovery of content in distributed archives. In this paper, we describe our experience and lessons learned in building Arc, the first federated searching service based on the OAI protocol. Arc harvests metadata from several OAI compliant archives, normalizes them, and stores them in a search service based on a relational database (MySQL or Oracle). At present we have over 165K metadata records from 16 data providers from various domains.

REFERENCES

• 1: Van de Sompel, H. and Lagoze, C. The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative. D-Lib Magazine, 6(2), February 2000. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/ vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html
• 2: Van de Sompel, H., Krichel, T., Nelson, M. L., Hochstenbach, P., Lyapunov, V. M., Maly, K., Zubair, M., Kholief, M., Liu, X. and O'Connell, H. The UPS Prototype: An Experimental End-User Service across E-Print Archives, D-Lib Magazine 6(2), February 2000. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompelups/02vandesompel-ups.html
• 3: Kurt Maly , Mohammad Zubair , Hesham Anan , Dun Tan , Yunchuan Zhang, Scalable Digital Libraries Based on NCSTRL/Dienst, Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, p.168-179, September 18-20, 2000

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.7 Digital Libraries
          Subjects: Collection

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.1 Logical Design
          Subjects: Schema and subschema
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.7 Digital Libraries
          Subjects: Standards; Dissemination

General Terms:
Design, Documentation, Experimentation, Human Factors, Languages, Management, Performance, Standardization, Theory

Keywords:
digital library, open archive initiative