Emerging Trends in OAI-PMH Application

History

The Santa Fe Convention provides recommendations for interoperability among archives. The Convention is the result of a meeting of the Open Archives Initiative, which was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in October, 1999. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) was launched in an attempt to address interoperability issues among many existing and independent Digital Libraries. The OAI has since received much media attention in the digital library community and, primarily because of the simplicity of its standards and has attracted many early adopters (Suleman & Fox, 2001). The Santa Fe Convention was attended by participants from organizations maintaining e-print archives for open access or providing services through integrated Search interfaces or citation linking mechanisms to such archives. The focus was on high-level communication among systems and simplicity of protocols. The convention presents a simple technical and organizational framework to support basic interoperability among e-print archives and as such was the first step towards interoperability of e-archives for facilitating the access to scholarly literature. The Open Archives Initiative provides a process for growth and development. The mechanism for establishing interoperability is three fold, i.e. definition of a set of simple metadata element, use XML as a common syntax for representation and transport and definition of a common protocol (Santa Fe Convention, 2001).