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By John Perkins - February 2002
John Perkins, Executive Director of the CIMI Consortium, discusses the potential the Open Archives Initiative may hold for museums and talks about how CIMI have been testing the OAI protocol.
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Museums [1] have immensely rich information resources, but, access to much of the kinds of materials museums hold, is often not available through web search engines because it is in databases, dynamically generated, or in some other non-HTML form. These resources constitute what is becoming known as the Hidden Web estimated to contain 400-550 times more content than the commonly defined Web. [2]
If this problem alone were solved and all the Hidden Web resources were suddenly available for indexing the difficulty of finding reliable, useful, precise information would be seriously compounded not alleviated. One way to address this is through collecting and indexing metadata records, rather than indexing the entire contents of HTML pages, thereby providing greater possibilities for precision. This is essentially the traditional library approach of creating descriptive metadata and building union catalogs. However library-like catalogs are expensive to maintain and in the Web world difficult to find and hard to search across.
A particularly promising solution is to explore the utility of combining the best of traditional library and museum techniques such as creating descriptive metadata records in catalogs, with the best of new Internet techniques like large scale, machine harvesting of information. It is possible to consider this because of new developments in Web workable technical protocols, the uptake of XML as a way to package and transfer information, and the development of international standards for describing museum metadata content.
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes technical protocols and standards, collectively called the OAI technical framework, to facilitate the access to research information on the Web. It is based on the premise that a simple, easily implemented technical framework can allow holders of information to create repositories of metadata describing their resources that in turn can be harvested and made available for further processing or use. [3]
A vision of how the OAI protocol might be implemented is offered by the USA's Digital Library Federation. They describe a framework in which:
A data provider agrees to support a simple harvesting protocol and to provide extracts of item-level metadata in a common, minimal-level format in response to harvest requests from trusted service providers. …. A service provider …uses the harvest protocol to collect metadata … possibly after reaching some kind of formal agreement on terms and conditions of use. The service provider is then able to build intellectually useful services, such as catalogs and portals to materials distributed across multiple sites. The framework applies to a wide range of information resources of academic and scholarly interest including printed and electronic texts, science and social science data sets, visual materials, archival collections, geographic information system (GIS) data, sound and music, video, and any other type of resource for which metadata is typically created. [4]
A technical overview of the OAI Protocol and its relevance to museums has been previously described by CIMI [5] and presented at workshops [6].
Because of the perceived potential of OAI for museums CIMI participated as a pre-release tester of the OAI protocol. [7] As part of the test we built a generic OAI-compliant repository [8]. The repository architecture is described in detail in [5]
The initial evaluation demonstrated that the OAI protocol is indeed simple to build. CIMI has limited technical resources and skills but was nonetheless able to successfully build an OAI repository that appears to be useful. Based on the positive experience as an alpha implementer, CIMI plans to continue explorations of the OAI protocol and research its use by museums.
One way is by making the code for the CIMI repository and its associated explanatory materials available for downloading from the CIMI Website. [8] We hope museums will take advantage of its availability to install, experiment and use the protocol.
CIMI is also interested in conducting a more formal, large-scale test of the OAI for museums as a CIMI testbed to begin testing the OAI in real-world applications. As part of this work we plan using OAI V.1.x in combination with scoped extensions and other applications necessary for aggregation processes (e.g. editorial control, content management and enhancement, registry) to harvest and collect museum metadata. The purpose of the research is to explore how a specific community of users can use the OAI protocol and to begin the process of assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of OAI.
In addition to the CIMI-proposed research, which is still in the planning stages, individual CIMI members are proceeding with investigations of their own.
Australian Museums Online (AMOL) are OAI-enabling their regional servers beginning with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in early 2002. The regional server network is what allows smaller institutions to supply object records to the National Database of Museum Objects [9]. When completed the regional server network will rely entirely on the OAI protocol and not an ad-hoc collection of statically and dynamically generated html pages.
The Canadian federal Department of Canadian Heritage (PCH) in conjunction with the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and the National Library of Canada are experimenting with OAI as a method of harvesting and aggregating object records for the about-to-be-launched Canada Place Portal.
The Netherlands-based museum software company ADLiB Information Systems has implemented the OAI protocol in its Internet Server module that works in conjunction with any standard CGI Web server to publish museum data providing the potential for automated harvesting from a broadly distributed collection of institutions. ADLiB expects implementations where groups of museums such as Maritime Digital or IGEM will eventually employ OAI to create a joint web presence.
The Mellon Foundation has sponsored a comprehensive set of experiments in seven USA institutions to demonstrate the kinds of discovery and retrieval services that OAI might enable [10]. One of these projects involves the Research Libraries Group, Inc. researching how library catalogs might be transformed through the harvesting of RLG database records by an Internet search engine such as Google. Also with Mellon Foundation support, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of Michigan (UM) are collaborating on a joint project involving digital library objects and special collections. The UIUC proposal [11] gives a particularly detailed description of a number of relevant research questions and the nature of issues to be resolved for OAI to become a successful tool.
Regardless of the services developed there will be a number of issues relating to widespread adoption of the OAI protocol in the museum community. There is a need for the museum community to test hypotheses, assertions, and issues such as:
At this early stage of implementation and because OAI is designed to be a machine-based protocol it is difficult to find many human-consumable examples of implementations. The OAI Web site offers a useful Repository Explorer and links to tools [12] as does the CIMI site [8].
Both CIMI and many of our members have experience in the metadata harvesting business. It is this experience that motivates us to explore the OAI Protocol as an enabling technology to facilitate access to resources by making it easier for museums to expose and collect metadata. Sustained testing of the OAI protocol seems a logical and sensible research initiative that will bring us closer to making the rich information resources museums hold more widely available to researchers and other users.
The author would like to thank Carl Lagoze for his contributions to CIMI's OAI research and Henry Stern for developing the CIMI Repository. Thanks are also due to the Open Archives Initiative, the Digital Library Federation, the Mellon Foundation, Bert Degenhart Drenth, and all CIMI members for enabling the author to participate in the development of CIMI's thinking on the use of OAI in museums.
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John Perkins
Executive Director
CIMI Consortium
Canada
Phone: +1 902 4295392
jperkins@cimi.org
http://www.cimi.org/>
John Perkins is Executive Director of the Consortium for the Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI). CIMI is a group of the world's most prestigious museums, technology companies, and libraries working to advance museum digital intelligence through standards, research, testbeds, advocacy, training and international collaboration. Current interests are in the area of digital information object management and interchange for museums, metadata harvesting, and distributed searching, mobile computing, and content architecture for Semantic Web applications.
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For citation purposes:
Perkins, J. "Disclosing Digital Cultural Wealth: Museums and the Open Archives Initiative", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/activate/>
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