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The usefulness of the many on-line journals and scientific digital libraries that exist today is limited by the inability to federate these resources through a unified interface. The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) is one major effort to address technical interoperability among distributed archives. The objective of OAI is to develop a framework to facilitate the discovery of content in distributed archives. In this paper, we describe our experience and lessons learned in building Arc, the first federated searching service based on the OAI protocol. Arc harvests metadata from several OAI compliant archives, normalizes them, and stores them in a search service based on a relational database (MySQL or Oracle). At present we have over 320,000 metadata records from 18 data providers from various subject domains. We have also implemented an OAI layer over Arc, thus making hierarchical harvesting possible. The experiences described within should be applicable to others who seek to build an OAI service provider.
Liu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.