ACM SIGIR 2001 WORKSHOP

ON

OPEN ARCHIVES:  COMMUNITIES, INTEROPERABILITY, AND SERVICES

New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
September 13, 2001


OBJECTIVE

This workshop aims to promote interoperability among open archives and
digital libraries. It will help in the building of (1) services to support
such interoperability, and (2) communities interested in working together to
share information.

This workshop will allow those involved in the Open Archives Initiative
(OAI, www.openarchives.org), and those wishing to become involved, to extend
the Initiative through (a) sharing of technology, (b) description and
demonstration of services, and (c) community-based discussion of conventions
that ensure interoperability. 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. 


TOPICS OF INTEREST

In general, this workshop will include an introduction to OAI and provide
technology sharing and community building opportunities. With regard to OAI
and related technology, the following topics will be discussed:
* 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

Part of the workshop will be devoted to group discussions. Some may focus on
some of the above mentioned topics. But it is expected that most groups will
represent various communities. Thus grouping may be based on genre, e.g.,
those working with: educational resources, preprint services, technical
reports, electronic theses and dissertations. Other groupings may be based
on discipline, e.g., physics, chemistry, computing, information retrieval.


WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Edward A. Fox (Chair), Virginia Tech (member of OAI Steering Committee)
Hussein Suleman (Co-Chair), Virginia Tech (member of OAI Technical
Committee)


PARTICIPATION

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

This will be an open meeting with selection of participants based on
submissions to the Chairs giving:
* a one paragraph summary of prior or planned involvement in the Open
Archives Initiative;
* a 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);
* a list of others applying to attend with whom community discussions might
proceed (if known).

Submissions should be sent in ASCII or MS-Word form. All submissions will be
reviewed by the organizers. The position statements of invited participants
will be reproduced and distributed at the workshop.


CORRESPONDENCE

Please send all correspondence to both fox@vt.edu and hussein@vt.edu


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission (position statement):  July 16, 2001
Notification of acceptance:   July 31, 2001
Final submission (of revised position statement): August 15, 2001   
Workshop:     September 13, 2001


FURTHER INFORMATION

Background on OAI: The Open Archives Initiative 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.

See also website at http://purl.org/net/oaisept01