For immediate release April 8th, 2002

Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting v.2.0 scheduled for release.

Ithaca - NY, Los Alamos - NM — Public release of the OAI-PMH v.2.0 is scheduled for June 1st 2002.  This release is the completion of a process begun in January 2001 when Version 1.0 of the OAI-PMH became publicly available.  The stability of Version 1 over the past 15 months, except for a minor change due to XML schema modifications, has provided ample opportunity for public experimentation and testing.  Since September 2001 the Technical Committee has been involved in a thorough review of the Version 1 protocol and the results of the experimentation period.  On March 1st 2002, an alpha-specification of version 2.0 of the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was disseminated to a limited group who are reviewing the specification and producing initial implementations.  A beta-specification for OAI-PMH 2.0 will be made available for a broader group in early May 2002.   The goal of this extensive testing process is to have 2.0-conformant reference implementations and tools available by the time of the public release of the OAI-PMH v.2.0 on June 1st 2002.

An email distributed to the OAI community lists and archived at http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-general/2002-February/000130.html gives more details on the changes in OAI-PMH v 2.0 and the process that led to those changes.

At the time of writing, the confirmed alpha-testers of OAI-PMH v 2.0 are:

• The British Library
• Cornell U. -- NSDL project
• Cornell U. -- e-print arXiv
• Ex Libris
• FS Consulting Inc -- harvester for my.OAI
• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• InQuirion Pty Ltd, RMIT University
• Library of Congress
• NASA
• OCLC
• Old Dominion University -- ARC , DP9
• U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• U. Of Southampton -- OAIA, CiteBase, eprints.org software (date of 2.0 conformance yet to be announced)
• UCLA, John Hopkins University, Indiana University, NYU -- sheet music collection
• UKOLN, U. of Bath -- Resource Discovery Network
• Virginia Tech -- repository explorer

Support for Open Archives Initiative activities comes from theDigital Library Federation, the Coalition for Networked Information, and from National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-9817416.