Free Range Librarian

By Ed Summers: Follett by day, consultant at night; has published an article in Ariadne. (Yes, at MPOW we are talking about OAI. I am not a coder, but I do understand how OAI works, at least from a workpersonlike point of view.)

1. Brief overview of OAI-PMH

Well, actually he has launched into a discussion of Net::OAI::Harvester, but for an hour-long talk to techies who are familiar with this already, that’s fine.

N::O::H is a Perl module that lets you talk to harvesters in an easy way. It’s an open source module written in Object Oriented Perl and available on CPAN. (Other harvesters are from OCLC–Java-based; oai-perl from University of Southampton; Perl Harvester from Virginia Tech; 2 page OAI?)

Harvesting Verbs

Identify
ListMetadataFormats
ListSets
ListIdentifiers
GetREcords
ListRecords

RAW OAI

HTTP GET request
HTTP Response containing XML
REST: an antidote for the SOAP blues

Easy to parse it yourself
An OAI Repository can at least talk Dublin Core
Registries can be queried too

Later, he demonstrated running some simple programs to talk to a OAI-PMH repository at the Library of Congress. He showed us a list of sets from LC, such as lcphotos, nclc (National Child Labor Committee Photographs), fenton (Fenton Crimean War Photographs), etc.

Oops–had two phone calls I had to take… I’m sure it has been a good program! I see the “pros” up on the screen–it does XML parsing, it’s Perl-based.

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