DIGITAL LIBRARY INTEROPERABILITY WITH THE OPEN ARCHIVES INITIATIVE

Thomas Krichel
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
Brookville, NY 11548-1300
USA
Krichel@openlib.org
http://openlib.org/home/krichel

This tutorial introduces the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The initiative has its origins in the author self-archiving movement. It proposes a metadata harvesting protocol. This protocol offers a lightweight solution for the interoperability for any kind of digital libraries.
The tutorial introduces the technical infrastructure of proposed by OAI. It also looks at the historical context and broader aims of OAI. These are to some extent my own interpretations. They are insights that one can not gain from looking at the published documentation. However I feel that they are decisive for an understanding of OAI. 
At the time of writing, I plan to have the following outline for the tutorial

1.	The author self-archiving movement: arXiv, NCSTRL, RePEc
2.	Distributed Searching vs. metadata harvesting
3.	The UPS protoproto
4.	The Santa Fe convention
5.	The requirement for a generic digital library interoperability protocol
6.	The OAI technical meeting in September 2000
7.	The OAMH protocol
8.	Organisational structure of OAI
9.	Current important archives and their collections
10.	Implementation strategies
11.	Metadata work
12.	OAI and peer review
13.	Conclusion: the significance of OAI

The slides for the tutorial will be available at http://openlib.org/home/petrozavodsk_2001-09-12.ppt.