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First meeting
of the Open Archives initiative |
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Initiative:
Paul Ginsparg, Rick Luce, Herbert Van de Sompel
Meeting:
- Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico,
US, October 21-22 1999
- Sponsors:
Council on Library and Information Resources, the
Digital Library Federation, the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition,
Association of Research Libraries,
the Research Library of the Los Alamos
National Laboratory.
- Meeting moderators:
Clifford Lynch & Don Waters.
- Represented institutions/organizations:
American Physical Society,
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Research Libraries, California
Institute of Technology, Coalition for Networked Information, Cornell
University, Council on Library and Information Resources, Digital Library
Federation, Harvard University, HighWire Press, Library of Congress,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
NASA Langley, Old Dominion University, the Scholarly Publishing and
Academic Resources Coalition, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, University
of California, University of Ghent, University of Southampton, University
of Surrey, Vanderbilt University, Virginia Tech and Washington University.
- Represented eprint-initiatives:
arXiv.org
(=xxx), CogPrints, NDLTD,
RePEc, EconWPA,
NCSTRL, NTRS
- Participants: see separate
list
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Executive Summary
The Open Archives initiative has been set up
to create a forum to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author
self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance (see http://www.openarchives.org
).
The first, largest and most important such archive
is the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Physics Archive. Founded by Paul
Ginsparg in 1991, LANL now houses over 100,000 papers, mirrored worldwide in
15 countries with over 50,000 users daily and still growing (see http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_stats
). Other disciplines and institutions have begun to create public research archives
along the lines of LANL but what is needed are conventions that archives could
adopt to ensure that they work together so that any paper in any of these archives
could be found from anyone's desktop worldwide, as if it were all in one virtual
public library.
The participants in the meeting were digital
librarians and computer scientists specializing in archiving, metadata, and
interoperability, and they included the founders of the principal public research
archives that exist so far. The participants were diverse in their underlying
motivations, but entirely unified in their objective of paving the way for universal
public archiving of the scientific and scholarly research literature on the
Web.
The group agreed on minimal technical requirements
for archives. These will be published separately as the "Santa Fe Conventions"
and, in the next six months, will be implemented in the existing archives.
Technical Summary
The first meeting concentrated on the creation of cross-archive
end-user services. The aim was to try and identify general architectural and
technical characteristics of archive solutions, that would facilitate the creation
of such services. These characteristics could then be used as recommendations
for existing and upcoming initiatives.
The meeting started off with a presentation and demonstration
by a team consisting of Herbert Van de Sompel (University of Ghent and Los Alamos
National Laboratory), Michael Nelson (NASA Langley and Old Dominion University)
and Thomas Krichel (University of Surrey and RePEc initiative). This group had
built an experimental end-user service providing access to data originating
from main archive initiatives (arXiv, RePEc, NCSTRL, NDLTD, NTRS). A variety
of technologies were used in the project, including NCSTRL+ as the digital library
service, intelligent objects called buckets as a means to store the archive
metadata and the SFX linking solution as a means to interlink the eprint data
with the traditional scholarly communication mechanism. The presentation identified
problems that arose during the project, and discussion of those served to launch
the meeting. This presentation was followed by position papers on interoperability
issues presented by Carl Lagoze (Cornell University), Kurt Maly (Old Dominion
University), Ed Fox (Virginia Tech) and Caroline Arms (Library of Congress).
Following the initial presentations, there was a panel discussion
in which Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory), Paul Gherman (Vanderbilt
University), Eric Van de Velde (CalTech) and John Ober (University of California)
expressed their opinion on the possible pros and cons of institutional versus
discipline-oriented archive initiatives. The group concluded that many different
archive initiatives were likely to emerge, with different conceptual, organizational
and technical foundations. In order for such initiatives to successfully become
part of the scholarly communication system, interoperability was seen as a crucial
factor.
The group agreed that interoperability hinges on a fundamental
distinction between the archive-functions, which include data-collection and
maintenance and end-user functions, like the cross-system search and linking
prototype service described in the opening session. Although archive initiatives
can implement their own end-user services, it is essential that the archives
remain "open" in order to allow others to equally create such services. This
concept was formalized in the distinction between providers of data (the archive
initiatives) and implementers of data services (the initiatives that want to
create end-user services for archive initiatives). Stimulated by a presentation
by Thomas Krichel, the group agreed that an essential feature of the Santa Fe
Conventions would be that providers of data use a standard mechanism to state
the conditions under which their datasets can be used by implementers of data
services. Similarly, the implementers of data services could describe the use
they make of archive data.
This organizational argument was followed by a discussion on the
technicalities of creating end-user services for data originating from different
archives. The group recognized that there are basically two ways to implement
these: a distributed searching approach and a harvesting approach. The former
would require archives to implement a joint distributed search protocol, which
is not considered to be a low-entry requirement. Moreover, the technical experts
recognized that there are important problems of scale when implementing such
distributed search solutions, in light of the possible emergence of thousands
of institutional and/or subject-oriented archives worldwide. As such, the group
decided this was not a realistic approach at this point in time. Therefore,
as in the experimental project presented at the beginning of the meeting, a
harvesting solution was proposed. Such a harvesting solution would allow trusted
parties - the ones that subscribe to the Santa Fe Conventions - to selectively
collect data from different archives. It was identified that such a technique
requires an understanding regarding:
- Protocols to selectively harvest data;
- Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data;
- Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond
to harvesting requests.
It was recognized that providers of data could describe the details
of these interfaces in standard ways thus enabling implementers of data to create
archive-specific harvesters. Still, the group decided to go one step further
and to highly recommend the following:
- Protocols to selectively harvest data: implementation of part
of the Dienst protocol in order to achieve a uniform way to poll an archive
for its logical division(s) (subarchives) and to selectively harvest data
from these divisions.
- Criteria that can be used to selectively harvest data: there
should at least be support for a bulk harvest of all data from an archive,
as well as a mechanism to harvest based on accession date. Other harvesting
criteria that were thought to be important included author affiliation, subject,
publication type.
- Metadata formats that are used by archive solutions to respond
to harvesting requests: It is recognized that archives will use (an) internal
metadata format(s) best suited to deal with the material to be described.
Still, the group decided to propose a minimal Dublin Core compliant metadata
set, called the Santa Fe Set, that should be made available by all archives.
It is desirable that archives are able to respond to harvesting requests with
data delivered in both the internal metadata format as in the Santa Fe Set
format.
The representatives of existing archive
initiatives at the meeting as well as those from institutions that are in the
process of setting up archive initiatives agreed to comply to those guidelines.
The Dienst protocol will be enhanced to allow for the functions mentioned above
and a minimal Dienst release facilitating the process of making an archive compliant
to the required aspects of Dienst will be made available. A transport format
for MARC-formatted metadata will be proposed, as well as an XML DTD for the
description of the Santa Fe Set. The recommendations will be extensively documented
on a Web site. Adoption of the recommendations will be promoted worldwide.
The way forward
- The minimal Dienst protocol set will be implemented for all
archives that were represented at the meeting. This will allow for a first
round of experimentation with the creation of end-user services layered over
existing archives.
- The group identified the urgent need to discuss the mechanisms
used to submit material to archives.
- Paul Ginsparg suggested that a next meeting should be held
in Europe, in the first quarter of next year.
- It was also thought to be important to have a presentation
and/or workshop on the Open Archives Initiative at the ACM 2000 Conference
on Digital Libraries as well as at the European ECDLC.
- The experimental, non-productional prototype that was presented
at the meeting will temporarily be available for exploration at the beginning
of November 1999 at http://ups.cs.odu.edu
. The representatives of Old Dominion University, the Research Library of
the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of Ghent expressed their
interest in continuing this prototyping work.
- The UPS Initiative has been renamed. From now on it is the
Open Archives initiative.