Schedule of Events: Workshops

Open Archives: Communities, Interoperability and Services

Description

The Open Archives Initiative (www.openarchives.org) develops and promotes standards that aim to facilitate efficient dissemination of content. Its goal is to to serve communities wishing to share any type of information by ensuring interoperability and componentized, layered services. OAI was launched in October 1999 to provide a forum to discuss and solve problems of interoperability, initially among author self-archiving solutions. Now OAI aims to support all archives, both those focused on e-prints (e.g., preprints and reprints, often connected with journals and conferences) and those representing a wide variety of other content types (e.g., theses and dissertations, Web log files, and educational resources). The emphasis has been on allowing harvesting of metadata that describes diverse "records" of content, stored in managed repositories.

This workshop will allow those involved in the OAI, and those wishing to become involved, to extend the Initiative through sharing of technology, description and demonstration of services, and community-based discussion of conventions that ensure interoperability. The workshop will include an introduction to OAI and provide technology sharing and community building opportunities. Groups of people interested in applying OAI through collaborative, federated, and distributed activities are encouraged to use this workshop as a way to plan their future coordinated work in connection with OAI.

Expected audience:

Archivists, librarians, publishers, researchers and representatives of user communities with with an interest in interoperability of digital library systems and the building of services to support user communities.

Workshop topics will include (but are not limited to):

  • OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
  • Interoperability needs of individual communities
  • Building cross-archive services
  • Creating standards to support community-wide services
  • Evaluation of the work done thus far
  • Research issues
  • Organization of the OAI
  • Future directions of the OAI

Participation

This will be an open meeting with selection of participants based on:

  1. an email position statement of not more than 1000 words (half on what a person can contribute to the meeting topics and half on their background/prior work) to fox@vt.edu; and
  2. on prior or planned involvement in the Open Archives Initiative.

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Position statements must be received: August 15, 2001
  • Workshop: September 13, 2001

Submission and Selection:

Submissions should be sent in ASCII or MS-Word form to:

fox@vt.edu

All submissions will be reviewed by the organizers. The position statements of invited participants will be reproduced and distributed at the workshop.

Organizers:

  • Edward A. Fox (Chair), Virginia Tech
  • Hussein Suleman, Virginia Tech

Contact Information: