For immediate release                   Contact: Daniel Greenstein 202-939-4762 August 25,
2000                                        [log in to unmask]
                                                        Clifford Lynch 202-296-5098
                                                        [log in to unmask]

Open Archives Initiative Appoints Steering Committee
Washington, D.C.—The Open Archives initiative (OAi) has established a
steering committee to guide its development and promote its adoption as an
enabling framework for the development of innovative networked information
services. In addition, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and the
Digital Library Federation (DLF) have agreed jointly to supply some
organized support and resources for the ongoing OAi effort.
The OAi has its genesis in an October 1999 meeting held in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, under the sponsorship of the Council on Library and Information
Resources (CLIR), the DLF, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources
Coalition, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Research Library
of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Focusing on the interoperation of
"e-print archives" (collections of electronic journal articles and
preprints), the OAi discussed an approach known as metadata harvesting. In
this approach, there are data providers and service providers. Data
providers (such as individual e-print archives) support a simple harvesting
protocol and provide extracts of metadata in a common, minimal-level format
in response to requests from service providers. Service providers use
extracted metadata to build higher level, user-oriented services, such as
catalogs and portals to materials distributed across multiple e-print sites.
The approach and its protocols were documented in the “Santa Fe convention,”
along with preliminary ideas about acceptable use policies, registries, and
other issues. More information is available at www.openarchives.org.

A subsequent workshop, held in conjunction with the ACM Digital Libraries
meeting in San Antonio in June 2000, reviewed experiences in implementing
the Santa Fe convention and mapped out issues that needed to be addressed.
Out of that meeting came a consensus that the Santa Fe convention will be
revised and updated with the intent of producing a new version of the
document by January 2001. The newly established steering committee will
oversee these efforts and will assemble technical experts as required.

In addition, there is considerable interest in extending the concepts
developed at the Santa Fe convention beyond their initial context in order
to support metadata harvesting for a wider range of digital resources of
academic and scholarly interest.  Besides e-prints and electronic texts,
such resources include science and social science data sets, visual
materials, archival collections, geographic information system data, sound
and music, and video. This work is being pursued under the auspices of the
DLF, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Unlike the project
involving the e-print archives, this effort is still highly experimental and
requires validation through implementation experience. The steering
committee will also help to guide the integration of this effort into the
further evolution of the Santa Fe convention.

Members of the OAi steering committee include the following:

Caroline Arms (Library of Congress)
Lorcan Dempsey (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK)
Dale Flecker (Harvard University)
Ed Fox (Virginia Tech)
Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Daniel Greenstein (DLF)
Carl Lagoze (Cornell University)
Clifford Lynch (CNI)
John Ober (California Digital Library)
Diann Rusch-Feja (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)
Herbert van de Sompel (Cornell University)
Don Waters (The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)

The Digital Library Federation is a partnership of research libraries
dedicated to creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed
collection of digital materials accessible to scholars and to a wider
public. It operates under the umbrella of CLIR, which works in partnership
with libraries, archives, and other information providers to advocate
collaborative approaches to preserving the nation’s intellectual heritage
and strengthening the many components of its information system.

The Coalition for Networked Information is an organization to advance the
transformative promise of networked information technology for the
advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual
productivity.
Founded in 1990 by the Association of Research Libraries, Educom, and CAUSE,
CNI is supported by the members of an institutional Task Force representing
higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information
technology, and libraries and library organizations. CNI works on issues
related to the themes of developing networked information content;
transforming organizations, professions, and individuals; and building
technology, standards, and infrastructure

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Daniel Greenstein
Director, Digital Library Federation
1755 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Suite 500
Washington DC 20036
ph: (202) 939-4762
fax: (202) 939-4765