Jill,

I wrote an OAI-PMH implementation a couple of years ago, as an add-on to a local database + web application, without prior experience with it. I'm not aware of an "easy tutorial," but OAI-PMH is built on HTTP and XML, so if your developers understand those basic technologies, they should find that the official spec is quite readable and concise.

http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html

There are only six verbs, some of which have very simple responses. Also, some features are optional, so depending on your needs, they could start by skipping the optional aspects, and you could see if that's sufficient.

Regards,
Greg

From: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Jill Ellern <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Code for Libraries <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, September 13, 2021 at 4:07 AM
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [CODE4LIB] Do we have any OAI programmers here? I have questions.

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