VITAL OAI Provider Toolkit

Abstract

The poster will announce and illustrate the availability and flexibility of the VITAL OAI Provider toolkit (http://code.google.com/p/simple-oai-provider/). Released by VTLS for the open-source community, this software includes a Java™-based framework for simplifying the development of OAI providers and providing a foundation for future development by the community. VTLS, in partnership with the ARROW project, has developed a sample provider for Fedora-based repositories that leverages an existing Solr index to include enhanced support for sets and multiple metadata formats. The poster will demonstrate the advantages of this architecture and how this solution is used in the VITAL product.

Detail

The VITAL OAI Provider toolkit is a Java API that exposes the basic functions of a provider and allows new providers to be built using a simple API. The complex requirements of session management and error handling are controlled by the toolkit. This abstraction allows repository developers to easily integrate and extend their applications without implementing complicated rules and validation. The included provider generates results based on a Solr index. Apache Solr is an open-source search solution based on Lucene and is used to both enhance search-and-discovery and provide faceted browsing of VTLS’ commercial offering, VITAL. A sample OAI provider using this toolkit is also available for supporting Lucene-only indexes. Unlike other providers, the VITAL Solr OAI provider uses the public metadata of the repository to control how the content is published, so those institutions that may not want to expose their entire repository to harvesters can do so by limiting the results to any search within the repository content. Since this metadata is available to the provider, creating OAI sets is as simple as configuring a search query. Configuring the Solr provider in this manner is very simple and removes the obstacle of complicated setup and modifications to the repository content, as the poster will illustrate. We feel this offering will simplify the process of developing new, sophisticated OAI providers and, by promoting this work, we hope to broaden the availability of OAI providers and harvesters for the community at large.