Project Muse and OAI

Project MUSE is pleased to announce that MUSE data now can be accessed through OAI, Open Archives Initiative. By launching this capability, MUSE subscribers gain flexibility with the increased number of channels by which to access MUSE articles.

MUSE is a Repository

The purpose of OAI is to facilitate the exchange of metadata between various institutions and database providers with a goal of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. It allows an institution to gather metadata from database providers. OAI is designed to work between a Harvester and a Repository. A harvester is a client application that is operated by a service provider, such as an institution, as a means of collecting metadata from repositories. A repository is a network accessible server that is managed by a data provider, such as MUSE, to expose metadata to harvesters. As a repository, MUSE will receive HTTP requests from harvesters and respond by generating and serving XML documents. The data in these documents may contain the actual article metadata or it may be more general information that would then lead to further, more specific queries on the part of the harvester. This allows for a controlled crawl of the metadata. The essence of OAI is the exchange of the data; what a harvester does with MUSE metadata once they gather it is not part of OAI. There are only 6 OAI commands:

- Identify - Tells what version MUSE supports (2.0)

- List Metadata Formats - Shows all formats that MUSE supports (Dublin Core)

- List Sets - Gives listing of all journals in MUSE, which allows for subsequent crawling of specific titles.

- List Identifiers - Finds articles pertinent to the request (which can be filtered by date or journal) but retrieves only the identifier, not the full metadata.

- List Records - Same as List Identifiers but returns full metadata records. Can result in a very large document to be served to the harvester.

- Get Record - Same as List Records but requires an article identifier and returns only that one matching article's metadata.

The OAI functionality in MUSE is still in the beta phase and we encourage subscribers to contact us with feedback about the helpfulness of this technology in searching and retrieving articles in MUSE. Feedback may be sent to the MUSE Customer Support desk at muse@muse.jhu.edu.