Introduction

The OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a standard for sharing metadata across repositories. Every Fedora digital object has a primary Dublin Core record that conforms to the schema at: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd. This metadata is accessible using Fedora's OAI-PMH Provider Interface. Currently, only the Dublin Core metadata for each object may be disseminated via this interface. The Fedora OAI-PMH Provider Interface uses the standard OAI-PMH syntax and will accept any valid OAI-PMH Version 2 request.

Interface Syntax

The Fedora OAI-PMH Provider Interface is implemented as a java servlet and can be accessed using the following syntax:

• hostname – required hostname of the Fedora server.
• port – required port number on which the Fedora server is running.
• fedora – a required part of the Fedora servlet path.
• oai – a required part of the Fedora servlet path.
• verb – required keyword of the OAI-PMH 2.0 syntax.
• oai-pmh2.0-verb – required valid OAI-PMH 2.0 verb.

For example, to request an OAI _Identify_verb request, use a URL similar to the following:

and the Fedora repository will respond with an XML-encoded mime-typed stream providing identification information about the Fedora OAI provider.