Martha Brogan, Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library, Digital Library Federation, November 22, 2006. A major study (282 pp) of OAI interoperability from the DLF, one of the organizations, with CNI and NSF, that originally sponsored the development of the OAI-PMH. Excerpt:
This report updates and expands on "A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services," originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of "OAI implementation demographics," based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the "problem space" to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on online survey responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system.
The new report aims to inform DLF's continuing efforts "to foster better teaching and scholarship through easier, more relevant discovery of digital resources, and a much greater ability for libraries to build more responsive local services on top of a distributed metadata platform," as articulated in its successful IMLS National Leadership Grant, "The Distributed Library: OAI for Digital Library Aggregation." Extending over a two-year period from October 2004 through September 2006, the grant enables DLF to prototype a "second generation" OAI finding system. Concurrently, it affords DLF the opportunity to address challenges identified in the 2003 survey and voiced by early OAI adopters. In particular, DLF is building a comprehensive OAI registry, establishing best practices for shareable metadata, improving communication between data and service providers, and developing curricular materials and training sessions to introduce OAI best practices to a widening circle of institutions (Shreeves et al. 2005).
Using the 2003 survey as a point of departure, this companion report takes a fresh look at the evolution of interoperability and federating heterogeneous content, especially as realized through implementation of the OAI protocol. It re-examines the original set of digital library aggregation services as well as representative new initiatives in an effort to identify trends - progress, needs, and challenges. How are they evolving over time? What have they achieved? What is impeding their progress? How do they envision their future? An online survey conducted in fall 2005 gathered baseline information from more than forty aggregators....
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
