Search results

This paper describes the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting in the NSF’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The protocol is used both as a method to ingest metadata into a central Metadata Repository and also as the means by which the repository exports metadata to service providers. The NSDL Search Service is used to illustrate this architecture. An early version of the Metadata Repository was an alpha test site for version 1 of the protocol and the production repository was a beta test site for version 2. This paper describes the implementation experience and early practical tests. Despite some teething troubles and the long‐term difficulties of semantic compatibility, the overall conclusion is optimism that the Open Archive Initiative will be a successful part of the NSDL.