OAI Might Be a Part of Your Metadata Analysis and Remediation

First things First. OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative. “The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.“ If you’ve made your way to the Bridge2Hyku website, you’re in the dissemination of content business. OAI uses an XML framework, so some knowledge of library metadata practices is required to use it.

OAI-PMH provides another avenue for digital library and metadata analysis, which we recommend to do as part of your migration strategy. For example, By using the “ListSets” verb (as shown here ) you can get a list of all of your current collections, which could be tedious to do in other ways depending on your digital repository.

The basics and a lot of great links can be found on this blogpost:
OAI-PMH: Basics and Resources

If you need to step back and get a better understanding of XML:
XML Basics

OAI provides a lengthy protocol document

To get familiar with OAI’s potential for your circumstance, you can start looking at OAI by simply manipulating the url’s of the examples below, using the verbs available here (but be careful not to request all records for a collection, there are ways to limit the number of records returned):

http://contentdm.li.suu.edu/oai/oai.php?verb=ListSets

http://export.arxiv.org/oai2?verb=GetRecord&identifier=oai:arXiv.org:cs/0112017&metadataPrefix=oai_dc