Creating a Union Catalogue of Archival Records Using the OAI-PMH Protocol

This article, after introducing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), tries to show how this protocol can be useful for creating union catalogues of archival records. The overall objective of OAI-PMH is to facilitate the transfer of information as metadata in network environments. It does so using Dublin Core metadata elements, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This article defines metadata, introduces the metadata elements of Dublin Core and shows the proposed structure of metadata record based on the proposed pattern in the XML template. It also gives some explanations about the six requests for metadata using HTTP protocol and shows that how record owners can play the role of data providers and record preserving bodies can act as service providers. Finally, the main and subsidiary benefits of using this protocol have been pointed out.