OAI and NASA’s scientific and technical information

Abstract

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an evolving protocol and philosophy regarding interoperability for digital libraries (DLs). Previously, "distributed searching" models were popular for DL interoperability. However, experience has shown distributed searching systems across large numbers of DLs to be difficult to maintain in an Internet environment. The OAI-PMH is a move away from distributed searching, focusing on the arguably simpler model of "metadata harvesting". We detail NASA's involvement in defining and testing the OAI-PMH and experience to date with adapting existing NASA distributed searching DLs (such as the NASA Technical Report Server) to use the OAI-PMH and metadata harvesting. We discuss some of the entirely new DL projects that the OAI-PMH has made possible, such as the Technical Report Interchange project. We explain the strategic importance of the OAI-PMH to the mission of NASA's Scientific and Technical Information Program. OAI and NASA's Scientific and Technical Information AbstractThe Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an evolving protocol and philosophy regarding interoperability for digital libraries (DLs). Previously, "distributed searching" models were popular for DL interoperability. However, experience has shown distributed searching systems across large numbers of DLs to be difficult to maintain in an Internet environment. The OAI-PMH is a move away from distributed searching, focusing on the arguably simpler model of "metadata harvesting". We detail NASA's involvement in defining and testing the OAI-PMH and experience to date with adapting existing NASA distributed searching DLs (such as the NASA Technical Report Server) to use the OAI-PMH and metadata harvesting. We discuss some of the entirely new DL projects that the OAI-PMH has made possible, such as the Technical Report Interchange project. We explain the strategic importance of the OAI-PMH to the mission of NASA's Scientific and Technical Information Program.

User evaluation of the NASA technical report server recommendation service

“…In late 2002, a new version of NTRS based on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [4] was developed. The design and development of the OAI-PMH NTRS is covered in detail in [5]. One of the features of the new version of NTRS is a recommendation service.…”

Testing gravitational theories using eccentric eclipsing detached binaries

“…In Fig. , we show the results of the one‐way variance analysis performed on the groups relative to the different theories under test; using the technique of the boxplot (Nelson ), we describe, concisely, the distributions of (top left), (top right), (bottom left) and the groups constituted by and (bottom right) for the different theory samples. We must note that the medians of the distributions are not different within the errors, whereas, by the positions of their percentiles, we observe an asymmetry and the presence of eight outliers, namely V889 Aql, α Crb, AS Cam, HH Car, EK Cep, BM Mon, BW Aqr and VV Pyx, well known from the literature.…”

The OAI-PMH NASA technical report server

“…However, it was not until 1995 that the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) was setup to provide integrated searching between the various NASA web-based DLs. NTRS proved extremely successful with the public; a detailed history of NASA's WWW DLs can be found in [1].…”