The Open Archives Initiative

Citation

Geller, M. and Peterson, J. (2000), "The Open Archives Initiative", Library Consortium Management: An International Journal, Vol. 2 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lcmij.2000.24702aab.003

The Open Archives Initiative

Marilyn Geller and Jan PetersonFaxon, RoweCom Academic and Medical Services, USA

This column brings to the attention of consortium managers Web sites that should be of particular interest.

The Open Archives Initiativehttp://www.openarchives.org/

The Open Archives Initiative was originally created as a forum "to discuss and solve matters of interoperability between author self-archiving solutions, as a way to promote their global acceptance." The inspiration for this project comes from the very successful Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Physics Archive founded in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg. The first meeting of the group was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 21-22 October 1999, and it brought together digital librarians and computer scientists and focused on archiving, metadata, and interoperability. The result of this meeting was the Santa Fe Convention issued in February 2000. According to Web site documentation, the Santa Fe Convention "presents a technical and organizational framework designed to facilitate the discovery of content stored in distributed e-print archives". It makes easy-to-implement technical recommendations for archives that - when implemented - will allow data from e-print archives to become widely available via its inclusion in a variety of end-user services such as search engines, recommendation services and systems for interlinking documents. In addition, the convention introduces an organizational framework for making information available about archives that adhere to the technical recommendations of this convention and about trusted parties that build end-user services for data originating from such archives. The site is rich in documentation, although much of it is very technical, but it is also very rich in ideas.