Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

Cole, Timothy W. and Muriel Foulonneau. Using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007. 208 pp. 45.00 USD. ISBN-10: 1-59158-280-6. ISBN-13: 978-1-59158-280-9. ∞ Using the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is much more than its title suggests. It is an impressively substantial work on the central mechanism of scholarly communication. It abounds with extensive insights and information, applicable to institutional archives, discipline-based aggregators and other new services. The general structure of the book progresses in a helpful manner from general to specific and from theory to the basics of designing and implementing services using the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The work is divided into three major sections: introduction and context; protocol implementation; and creating and using sharable metadata. The last two sections correspond largely to the roles of the OAI data provider and OAI service provider respectively. In the introduction the authors advise the reader against deadly bloat as the killer of workable services. They credit the success of the protocol so far to the refusal to permit that condition, with the result that every effort has been made to keep the protocol simple and robust and thereby lower the technical barriers to its adoption. Success is measured by the rapid adoption of the protocol by library, archive, and museum communities. They also warn against de-contextualizing collections. The context section includes a long history of the initiative through practice for the data and service provider to the end 2006. The authors allude to a predecessor system in the field of physics as having a strong and robust history of preprints in print format. A very positive feature of the work is a brief section on Building Community, which shows that marketing and developing relationships are recognized even in this mostly technical work as necessary steps in building relevant and technically superior services. From the perspective of a technical reader, the book is very well constructed. For the non-technical reader the terminology used by the authors, is a big problem. Terminology at the first occurrence is italicized and defined. Thereafter, it appears as a term in plain text or as an acronym. The authors should not be blamed for the rapidly evolving technology and changing terminology in this field; however, the insertion of a glossary or a table of equivalents would have saved the reader some frustration when confirming the meaning of such terms. One rather helpful convention for displaying OAI and XML coding is the use of Courier font within the text. The authors are rigorous in their use of internationally recognized acronyms, like OAI, and EAD, but unfortunately they also include a shower of lesser known nationally and regionally significant acronyms like LANL or CWDA-Lite. Standards are quoted mostly in U.S. terms, such as NISO equivalents and Dublin Core (DC), without it being made clear that the standard in this case is for the United States. Instead of revealing the ISO connection with DC early on, it is done almost as an afterthought toward the end of the work. Had the authors made it clear that DCMES (Dublin Core Metadata Element Set) is one and the same as ISO 15386, a cloud of terminology surrounding Dublin Core, such as DC, DCMI, and DCMES could have been resolved for international readers. Likewise, that ISO 23950 Information Retrieval: Application Service Definition and Protocol Specification is NISO Z39.50 by any other name, since they are technically identical with minor editorial differences. Similarly use of ISO 2079, a data transmission standard, which librarians have adopted worldwide, could supplant MARC or variants, such as, MARC21. …

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