OAI and AMF for academic self-documentation

Abstract(s)

This paper examines the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and the Academic Metadata Format (AMF). The Open Archives Initiative Protocol (OAI-PMH) provides a technical framework for the harvesting of metadata contents. The main feature and advantage of the protocol is that is relatively (compared to say Z39.50) easy to implement. The Academic Metadata Format(AMF)is a modular metadata model for academic authors, institutions, documents, and collections of documents. It uses standard vocabularies wherever possible and simply builds an XML framework for their usage. AMF can be used to build descriptions of complete academic disciplines that relate authors to their institutions, to the documents that they have written and to the organization of documents into collections. The RePEc and Socionet projects can serve as examples of the described approach.