A statewide metasearch service using OAI‐PMH and Z39.50

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe the Illinois LSTA grant‐funded project, “Yellow Brick Roads: Building a Digital Shortcut to Statewide Information”. The project investigated the feasibility of unified searching across library holdings, digitization projects, and online state government information through use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI‐PMH) in tandem with the Z39.50 protocol through application of the Z39.50/OAI Gateway Profile.Design/methodology/approachThe project proceeded through the construction of a metasearch service model based on the Z39.50/OAI Gateway Profile. Technical obstacles encountered during the construction of this demonstration service were noted, as were potential solutions. The evaluation of the Z39.50/OAI harvesting component of the Gateway Profile was conducted by means of a questionnaire of vendors providing Z39.50 servers to the Illinois Regional Library Systems.FindingsThe established technology platform provided by the University of Illinois Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Metadata Harvesting Project proved to be adequate to data sets of this size and character. However, the project concluded that the Z39.50/OAI Gateway Profile could not be deployed because of limitations in the functionality of typical Z‐servers.Research limitations/implicationsThe project concentrated on the technical aspects of building such a service model rather than on the usability of the interface or on questions of interoperability at the metadata level, such as to what extent the vocabularies used by the different metadata communities was compatible.Originality/valueThe project's findings indicate that more labor intensive, or less timely, processes of aggregating records than that envisaged by the Z39.50/OAI approach will continue to be necessary. However, further investigation of hybrid approaches hold promise.

Digital repository ``Geology of the Russian Far East'' -- an open access to the spatially distributed online scientific publications

“…Thus, the Portal harvests the bibliographic descriptions from other repositories (on the OAI-PMH Protocol) and from library catalogues (on the Z39.50 Protocol) [Kaczmarek and Naun, 2005] or uses the function of export of the library management system. The Portal realizes the technological possibility of the metadata harvesting from the full-text scientific databases, such as the Scientific Electron Library and Science Direct.…”

The first 30 years of the internet through the lens of an academic library

“…The University of Michigan's Oaister service, now operated by OCLC, harvested metadata from many hundreds of OAI repositories worldwide, and provided access to that metadata through a simple search interface. A team at Illinois, working with librarians from a number of institutions, experimented with OAI to provide access to digitized content from libraries in Illinois, the CIC, and institutions who were recipients of IMLS collections digitization grants (Cole and Shreeves, 2004;Kaczmarek and Naun, 2005;Foulonneau et al, 2006). OAI-PMH has been used in numerous projects, including the National Science Digital Library (NSDL), the DLF Aquifer projects, the American West and American South projects.…”

Interoperability models in digital libraries: an overview

“…ZMARKO is used in another project in order to gather bibliographic records from 12 state libraries in Illinois, USA. ZMARKO acts as a data provider allowing MARC records available through a Z39.50 server to be made available via the OAI‐PMH (Kazmarek and Naun, 2005). In fact, project team member, Tom Habing, developed an OAI‐PMH/Z39.50 gateway for the purpose of creating an appropriate response to OAI‐PMH requests layered over the Z39.50 server.…”

“…Each member is responsible for updating their data in a central metadata list (Jin, 2004). In order to harvest bibliographic data from 12 state libraries in Illinois, USA, Kazmarek and Naun (2005) in their research article, mentioned that they used the harvesting model by OAI‐PMH besides the federated model by Z39.50.…”