[OAI-implementers] University of Michigan Announces Open-Source OAI Toolkit

[Kat Hagedorn]

The University of Michigan Libraries is pleased to announce the release of
their open-source OAI toolkit on SourceForge. This toolkit contains both
harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/umoaitoolkit/
 
UMHarvester is a robust tool using LWP for harvesting nigh on every OAI data
provider available. It allows for incremental harvesting, has multiple
re-try options, and a batch harvest tool (Batch_UMHarvest) that can
automatically perform incremental harvesting.
 
UMProvider relies heavily on libxml (XML::LibXML) and will store the data in
nearly any relational database. It functions by harvesting from a database
of records, making rights determinations from a separate database, and
providing the resulting set of records.
 
Originally, only the UMHarvester was available from UM's DLXS software site.
The UMProvider tool is newly developed and takes the place of our DLXS data
provider tool.
 
One of the benefits of developing UMProvider was our ability to ingest and
make available the records of MBooks texts being digitized by Google at the
University of Michigan Libraries.

    http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify
 
Currently, only MBooks records available in the public domain are exposed,
and we have split these into sets containing public domain items according
to copyright law in the United States, and public domain items worldwide.
There are currently over 100,000 records. We anticipate having 1 million
records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by
Google.
 
    http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=ListSets
 
We plan to move the texts available through our previous UM Libraries data
provider (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/b/broker20/broker20/) into
UMProvider over the coming year.

We would recommend harvesting the MBooks records using the re-try option on
your harvester to avoid timeouts.

For questions about the project, please contact dlps-help at umich.edu.

-------------------
Kat Hagedorn 
OAIster/Metadata Harvesting Librarian
DLXS Bibliographic Class Coordinator
Digital Library Production Service
University of Michigan

http://www.oaister.org/
http://www.dlxs.org/
email: khage at umich.edu
phone: 734-615-7618