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Specifications for Repository Federations - Part 2

Harvesting Let's start off with something that is not so contentious - a specification for harvesting (harvesting is the gathering of information about resources (metadata) from one or more repositories and storing it for use in (potentially) value-add services). At work we are involved in a number of federations and there is really only one specification that comes to mind for harvesting and that is OAI/PMH. OAI/PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting):

"is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP."