Design and Implementation of a Custom OAI Search and Discovery Service

Abstract

The Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is fundamentally a lightweight, Web-based service for transporting XML-formatted metadata. Data providers with metadata that they wish to expose will typically implement the OAI-PMH service on one of their Web servers. In order to harvest the metadata, service providers will make requests to these services. Service providers typically aggregate harvested metadata from multiple data providers in order to develop services for their end-users, such as a topical search portal. This paper includes a brief history of the OAI-PMH, and describes a topical search portal that was developed at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Grainger OAI Reports Service focuses on the topics of engineering, computer science, and physics.