The Expanding World of OAI

摘要

I recently called standards the "engine of interoperability" (LJ 12/03, p. 33), but I could have also called them the "building blocks of innovation." Standards, when done well, provide an important foundation on which new innovations can be built. Within the digital library community this is most evident in the development of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAI-PMH was created in 2001 as a means to distribute metadata for digital objects, mostly papers in e-print repositories. Since then, it has not only been implemented widely by such repositories, it has also been used in unforeseen ways.