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OAI Support

This guide details the support for the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting in CONTENTdm Versions 3.4 and higher. If you are running a previous version of CONTENTdm and would like to enable support for OAI, you will need to upgrade to Version 3.4 or higher.

Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

CONTENTdm Server Versions 3.4 and higher provide support for the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting Version 2.0 (OAI-PMH v2). Specifically, the CONTENTdm Server acts as an OAI-PMH repository and as such can field requests from an OAI-PMH harvester to make the metadata available for stored items. For more information on OAI-PMH, visit www.openarchives.org.

Configuration

You must enable OAI support on your CONTENTdm Server before it will act as an OAI-PMH repository. When OAI support is enabled, the default setting will make all Published collections available for harvesting.

In Versions 3.4 and 3.5, the only method for limiting OAI harvesting is to designate the collection as Not Published. Unpublished collections will not be harvested. To change the collection designation click the View/edit collection configuration link from the Collection Administration page.

In Version 3.6 and higher, you can specify which Published collections may be harvested within the OAI configuration file. If you do not specify collections for OAI harvest then all of your Published collections will be harvested.

To configure the OAI settings for your Server, edit the OAI configuration file named oai.txt located on your CONTENTdm Server in the Server conf directory (by default, this is C:\Program Files\Content\Server\conf\oai.txt in Windows and /usr/local/Content/conf/oai.txt in Unix). Figure 1 shows a sample configuration file:

Figure 1: OAI configuration

Figure 1. Sample OAI configuration file

To enable OAI:

  1. Change the value of EnableOAI from 'No' to 'Yes' to enable OAI support.

  2. Enter a name for your repository and the e-mail address of your server administrator.

    3. After configuration, the base URL for your OAI repository is http://your.address.here/cgi-bin/oai.exe.

To specify collections for harvest:

If you wish to make some but not all of your collections available for OAI harvesting you must use a Collections directive and list those collections that should be harvested. An example of this directive is shown in the last line of the configuration file shown in Figure 1.

  1. In the OAI config file, type Collections. This directive is case-sensitive.

  2. Add one or more spaces then list collection aliases corresponding to those collections that are to be made available for harvesting. Each alias must be separated by one or more spaces and preceded by a forward slash as shown below:

    Collections   /hegg  /document  /nwimages  /seattlehistory

    Organizations with many collections may prefer to use multiple Collection directives for ease of maintenance as shown below:

    Collections   /hegg
    Collections   /document
    Collections   /nwimages
    Collections   /seattlehistory

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