Metadata Harvesting From Divergent Resources : Tools and Techniques

The Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an interoperability framework that facilitates discovery of resources from multiple digital repositories from a single search service, known as OAI Service Provider. Even though OAI-PMH has become very popular among scholarly repositories, majority of scholarly literature still do not support it. Although this situation will keep improving, we cannot expect all the scholarly resources to be OAI-compliant at the article-level any time soon. This is especially true in case of primary resources, keeping in view that there are nearly 300,000 periodicals listed in the Ulrich's database. On the other hand, many publishers are providing metadata of their publications in disparate formats through many user-centric services, such as, email alerts, RSS feeds, and online table of contents. This work describes an experiment to bring these alternative sources of metadata into the fold of OAI-PMH so that OAI-based search index can be augmented with metadata from non-OAI-compliant resources.