OAI Archives¹

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Overview of European Activities on OAI in relation to worldwide activities

The Open Archives Forum project conducted a survey on the European activities taking part in OAI.

To see the relationship between European activities to worldwide activities, the following resources² were used (state: August 2003):

• Open Archives Initiative
• Open Archives Forum
• OAI Repository Explorer
• Eprints.org
• Signal-Hill

If one considers origin, current advancement and concomitantly longer experiences with OAI, the only weak numeric inferiority of European activities compared with those of North America is surprising. However, if one looks at the more detailed country list shown in the figure below, it is noticeable that within Europe there is an unequal involvement among countries already engaged in OAI activities. (Both figure charts does not consider projects in development.)

To obtain an overview of what software was used to become an OAI compatible repository, the data of the repositories published in the web pages or in metadata were examined.

With a very large part no data about used tools is to be found. In particular many of the already longer existing OAI repositories are based on self-developments without a special tool designation. Some mention VT-OAI, only few oaicat or ETD-db and other software tools like CDS, IMDI and arXiv were in each case only stated once.

Most remarkable is however the rapid spreading of the Eprints software from the University of Southampton ( for both: Data - and Service Providers) within the last year.

Since the last survey in November 2002 (3/4 year ago) the number of repositories, which run by Eprints is more than trebled. At that time the tool was implemented in particular by European archives. Today a growing world-wide spreading is to be observed.

At the last survey at the end of November 2002 it was surprising that although the Open Archives Initiative deadline for upgrading to OAI-PMH 2.0 was 1 December 2002, results showed that more than half of the repositories were still using OAI-PMH Version 1.1 and had not changed over to Version 2.0.

In the meantime the upgrade had been done to a considerable degree - more than 80% of repositories implemented OAI-PMH Version 2.0 (partly parallel to the older Version 1.1).

Overview of European Open Archives Activities based on OAI implementations

In this chapter, we basically distinguish between different types of Data Providers: subject gateways, institutional repositories, library online public access catalogues (OPACs), commercial publishers and vendors, and media archives and museums. Service Providers offer either search services or extended services. The following section gives a partial overview of existing Data and Service Providers in Europe today.

Two examples of extended services³

• CYCLADES -The EU project (CNR Pisa, Italy) CYCLADES builds an "Open Collaborative Virtual Archive Environment". It contains an access service to store information in a local database and a collection service to structure the user's workspace. CYCLADES provides search and browse facilities and allows filtering on individual user and community profiles. It also includes a recommendation service and a collaborative workspace.
• TORII - A second extended service is TORII (TIPS, iCite) by SISSA Italy. It provides a portal where tools and documents are collected under a unified access point. TORII includes a personal workspace for scientists allowing them to rank documents according to user profile and to measure impact factors. TORII contains the Okapi search engine and the iCite environment, which extracts citations from the documents to the archive.

Exemplary representation of different Data Provider types

We found OAI compliant repositories in: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Norway, The Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Many institutional archives are planned or are being initiated. Some funded projects include Service Providers. In particular, the University of Southampton has projects with international impact. You can find detailed lists of OAI projects on some of the slides presented at the 2nd OA-Forum workshop in Lisbon⁴.

Examples of European Data Providers: subject gateways⁵

• Medicine: Behavioral and Brain Science Prints Interactive Archive, Cambridge University Press, UK
• Economics: RePec, Research Papers in Economics, UK
• Mathematics: Math-Net, University of Osnabrück, Germany
• Physics: PhysNet/ PhysDoc, University of Oldenburg, Germany
• Cognitive Science: CogPrints, University of Southampton, UK
• Psychology: Psycology, University of Southampton, UK
• Educational Sciences: Education-line, University of Leeds, UK
• Organic Agriculture: Organic Eprints, Denmark
• Philosophy: Sammelpunkt. Elektronisch archivierte Theorie, Austria

Examples of European Data Providers: institutional repositories (by the example of Germany)

• University library document server⁶: DuetT (Univ. Duisburg), edoc (Humboldt Univ., Berlin), eldorado (Univ. Dortmund), E-LIB (SuUB Bremen), HSSS (SLUB, TU Dresden), LMU (Univ. Munich), MONARCH (TU Chemnitz), Open Archive Portal (Univ. Tübingen), OPUS (Univ. Stuttgart)
• Media server of universities⁷: timms (University Tübingen)
• University library catalogues⁸: Univ. Library Oldenburg
• Library service institutions for the region⁹: BSZ-BW (Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg), Konstanz
• Spreading initiative: DINI¹⁰ - German Initiative for Networked Information, that produced recommendations to universities, libraries, etc. to follow the standards of the OAI released in December 2000 and hosts workshops on different topics, targeted to bring people together working on the same questions in the field of networked computing in general. There is a DINI working group on OAI.

Inventory of Repositories and Service Providers

The data recorded in the overview of European activities on OAI in relation to worldwide activities rely on several inventories which are all on the state of August 2003 (see links to different inventories below or on top of this page):

• Services schedules 38 service providers. For each the aspects name, URL, contact, short description and harvested data are registered as displayed below. This inventory is an extension of the OAI and OA-Forum database resources¹¹.
   

  Service
  URL
  Contact
  Service & content
  Harvested data

   

• Repositories (pdf-file, 662 KB) mentions 82 data providers from Europe and 109 from overseas. These lists essentially base on the resources¹² specified above. They register the aspects country, name, base URL, used tools, OAI-PMH version, short description and public URL as shown below.
   

  Country	Data Provider	Base URL(ORI Query)	Tool	Version	Description	URL