I’ve never implemented OAI-PMH myself, but I had looked into it many years back (and tried to convince our project that it was something that we needed to do)

I’m not aware of any introductions that I think are as thorough as you’d likely need for this, but Sickle has a summary of what the interface is, that might be useful for someone who has absolutely no experience with it:

https://sickle.readthedocs.io/en/latest/oaipmh.html

I also found a video that starts to explain why it’s useful.  The beginning seems to be superfluous at first, but if you trim it, you wonder why he’s talking about those two projects later in the video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fpz4fzKvVTg

But as they’re not from the library world, I don’t know that they’ll necessarily understand the context behind PMH.  They might need to understand that it was intended to help break data silos, so that we weren’t all implementing different protocols to get to our data, with each discipline having incompatible tools for searching.

Maybe something like PHD comic’s explanation of why there was the push for open access would help set the context if what people are trying to accomplish.  (It doesn’t directly mention PMH, but to do the sort of re-use they mention, you need it so you don’t need to write a new client for each and every collection you’re accessing):

https://youtube.com/watch?v=L5rVH1KGBCY

It’s possible that there are some videos out there from Herbert van de Sompel explaining the project from the early days, but I suspect the context would be science data, not library data.

(I was in a breakout group with him at a 2011 workshop on attribution of science data, and I understand now why he didn’t want to support the recommendation for data landing pages, as he probably thought it was a step backwards, but for most of us in the group, it was a step forward)

As we were all dealing with different types of data, we couldn’t just use something like z38.50 and its later incarnations as it assumed you were dealing with bibliographic records.   And although the OAIS reference model existed, it didn’t really dig into the whole concept of ‘finding aids’ much more than say such things existed.

I might be able to dig up a talk that I gave at ASIS&T around 2008 for a panel on protocols and standards …. I don’t think it was recorded, so you won’t have the issue that every third word in the talk was an acronym.

-Joe

Ps.  I assumed you’re talking about PMH from the context.  If you’re talking about ORE, I can try to dig up some of my old talks, where I’m trying to explain the issues of describing data collections where things are both subsetted and mirrored.

Sent from a mobile device with a crappy on screen keyboard and obnoxious "autocorrect"

> On Sep 13, 2021, at 4:07 AM, Jill Ellern <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Code4lib folks,
> 
> I have perhaps some stupid OAI questions.  We are moving off Contentdm and onto a platform with programmers that I’m pretty sure don't know OAI and harvesting at all.  We  have been thinking that it would be simple to convert our output of metadata that comes in a text format.  However, we see now that it drops the set structure (front and back of an image for example) especially since we have some collections that have different titles for the container (root description) and the images attached.  We do see a line with cpd but with different titles, it look like we might have to identify sets in Excel.  That sounds like a big job and a pain.  I'm thinking there is a better way with OAI but I don't know much about it.
> My thinking is that we can use OAI to move this data instead of text files.  I'm sure it has the structure built in...doesn't it?  Is there a easy tutorial on OAI?  I’m not finding much for the layperson. And our new vendor is pretty new to library land (they are in museum land) and we doubt if they know OAI and I don't see easy ways to teach them.  Do you have suggestions?
> 
> Jill Ellern
>