The following is a contribution to the LOD-LAM Open Agenda and is cross-posted on the LOD-LAM summit blog.

OAI-PMH is a great way to ship large "collections" of records between repositories.

The Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is the foundation on which the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project and the companion Opening History aggregation are built.* Although small increases in the use of OAI-PMH were seen over the course of the project, less than a quarter of IMLS National Leadership grant projects provide item-level metadata using OAI-PMH [1, 2]. In some cases, the projects in the the missing 75% are legitimate – they are not collection with readily available item-level metadata (e.g. narrative exhibits, interactives/games, etc.). But this still leaves many projects/collections out of a broader network of resources. OCLC/RLG found a higher percentage (48%) of member organizations using OAI-PMH, but it is unclear how much of their metadata was shared this way [3]. While recognizing that OAI-PMH has been successful at making millions of descriptions available, it’s worth pausing to wonder if 25-50% adoption is good enough.

In light of the rapid growth of LOD in the last few years, I’ve been wondering how a large-scale aggregation like IMLS DCC might fit into this environment. Here are a few questions to discuss at #LODLAM:

• What are the lessons from OAI-PMH that will be important for LOD-LAM?
• How is the lack of one, common protocol for sharing data a benefit and/or a danger?
• Will Linked Open Data be “low barrier” for some, but untouchable for many?
• Can/should we build LOD on top of existing OAI-PMH installations? (see [4, 5])
• Should we abandon OAI in favor of more web-friendly approaches? (See @edsu Digital Public Library as a Generative Platform)
• What are the lessons from the Museums and the Machine-Processable Web and Europeana for U.S. organizations?
• One of the reasons that OAI-PMH succeeded was through support of funders – what should funding agencies tell projects about implementing LOD?

LOD offer the opportunity to move smaller units of information, quickly, to more access points.

1. Palmer, C., Zavalina, O., Mustafoff, M. (2007) Trends in Metadata Practices: A Longitudinal Study of Collection Federation. pre-print available at: http://imlsdcc.grainger.illinois.edu/docs/JCDL07_final.pdf
2. Jett, J.G. (2010). Supplementing OAI-PMH in the IMLS Digital Collections & Content Aggregation. Masters Thesis. Available at: http://goo.gl/SaWPE
3. Ayers, L. , Camden, B. P. , German, L. , Johnson, P. , Miller, C. and Smith-Yoshimura, K. (2009) What we’ve learned from the RLG partners metadata creation workflows survey— Retrieved March 2, 2009 fromhttp://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2009-04.pdf
4. Haslhofer, B., & Schandl, B. (2008). The OAI2LOD Server: Exposing OAI-PMH metadata as linked data. International Workshop on Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2008), co-located with WWW. Available at: http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2008/papers/03-haslhofer-schandl-oai2lod-server.pdf
5. Haslhofer, Bernhard and Schandl, Bernhard (2010) Interweaving OAI-PMH Data Sources with the Linked Data Cloud. Int. J. Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 1 (5). pp. 17-31. Available at: http://eprints.cs.univie.ac.at/73/1/ijmso2010_haslhofer_schandl.pdf

Images:

• C & NW RR, a general view of a classification yard at Proviso Yard, Chicago, Ill. (LOC). Courtesy Library of Congress on Flickr.
• unknown, “Nottingham School at the Interstates edge,” in Teaching & Learning Cleveland , Item #3229, http://csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits/items/show/3229

* Disclaimer: these opinions are my own and may not reflect official opinions of the project or my colleagues.

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