Global picture of OAI-PMH repositories through the analysis of 6 key open archive meta-catalogs

TL;DR

This paper analyzes six key open archive meta-catalogs to understand repository coverage, highlighting the fragmentation and advocating for a unified meta-catalog to improve discoverability of OAI-PMH repositories.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of six major meta-catalogs, revealing their limited overlap and emphasizing the need for a unified catalog for better access.

Findings

Less than 1% overlap among the six meta-catalogs.

42.3% of repositories are unique to each meta-catalog.

Current meta-catalogs are fragmented, hindering effective discovery.

Abstract

By the end of the late 90's the Open Archives Initiative needed direction to insure its improvement and thus, created the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standard. The movement showed a rise in popularity, followed by a decline then a relative stabilization. This process was essentially a way to ensure the viability of open archive repositories. However, a meta-catalog containing an ensemble of repositories was never established, which lead to confusion of what could be found in said catalogs. This study ultimately aims to find out what repository content can be found and where with the use of the 6 key meta-catalogs. Although they undoubtedly have numerous limitations pertaining to the available data, this article seeks to compare the common data in each meta-catalog and estimates which repositories are found within them (with approx. less than 1% in common within the 6 meta-catalog). Decisively, this paper identifies the need to collate this data (with a total of 42.3% OAI-PMH repositories specific to each meta-catalog) and improve current search tools, hence portraying the benefits of a comprehensible single unifying meta-catalog for end users.