We’re very excited to check off another frequently-requested item off our development to-do list – LibGuides now offers full OAI-PMH support.
Need a refresher on OAI-PMH? To borrow from the official project site:
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP.
Basically, with the full OAI-PMH support in LibGuides it is now even easier to index and show results from your guides alongside all of your library resources – in your catalog, discovery layer, federated search system, institutional repository, you name it – if it supports OAI-PMH you can index LibGuides in it, too. We’ve been psyched to see folks creating more and more key library content – everything from course and subject guides to important documentation to entire library websites – in LibGuides. With OAI-PMH support in LibGuides your patrons can find your LibGuides content no matter where they begin their search. Imagine it – students searching for assignment help in your federated search engine find the LibGuide for their course – instruction for the win! A patron searching for library policies from the catalog discovers your About the Library guide – point of need help, kaboom! The guides you create are integrated right along all of your other library content – it’s indexing made easy. 🙂
On the LibGuides side, our OAI-PMH gateway retrieves the standard set of DC metadata tags for each guide in your system. These tags are tied to the descriptive information about your guide – guide title becomes a dc:title tag, guide description becomes dc:description, etc. To be clear, this isn’t a full text index of your guide content, though we may support this in the future if there’s widespread interest.
Ready to get started? Admins, head to Tools > Data Exports and click Get OAI Base URL to find the unique base URL for your LibGuides site. You’ll use this base URL in combination with the 6 standard OAI-PMH requests to generate search-indexer-friendly XML files.
Is this available for LibGuides v1?
Hi Aaron – this is only available for folks on the v2 platform. Thanks for the question!
Does this include database assets in the output? If not are there plans to do so.
Hi Peta! A-Z assets aren’t currently exposed in the output, only the list of guides and associated metadata. We don’t have plans to expand that at this point, but that’s a great idea! I’ll forward it to our development team for consideration. Thanks. 🙂
Thanks. We are looking for options to integrate into our website search results index, and to automate it as much as possible.
The xml exports or csv from A-Z database list still require someone to schedule the output and then send to appropriate team for action.
Ah, then I have good news for you! We aren’t planning OAI development, but you already can retrieve assets using the RESTful API. We will be releasing an expansion of the API soon so that all fields associated with database assets are accessible as well as a write API so that the communication can go both ways. Go to Tools > API in your LibGuides system to get started; API calls return JSON data.
Hi Peta!
Just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that adding AZ assets and E-Reserve courses to the OAI output is in development at this time. We expect to release in a few weeks; watch this space! 🙂