How to use the OAI-PMH Service
The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a standard protocol that can be used to harvest collections of metadata from an archive. The protocol lets you request all the records from an archive, or only a subset of the records, or only the records that have changed since your last harvest.
nzresearch.org.nz uses OAI-PMH to harvest metadata from New Zealand institutions, and also acts as an OAI-PMH sever to re-export that metadata in several ways.
Base URL
The nzresearch.org.nz OAI-PMH base URL is:
You can find information about the OAI-PMH server by sending an Identify request:
Harvesting
You can harvest the full nzresearch.org.nz metadata set with a GetRecords request:
- http://nzresearch.org.nz/index.php/oai?verb=GetRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
Alternatively, you can harvest only parts of the archive, such as the records related to a specific subject area, by specifying a set parameter.
Sets
nzresearch.org.nz provides OAI-PMH sets, which that allow you to harvest only parts of the database. Sets are currently provided for each institution, for each Marsden subject code, and for each author.
You can use the ListSets verb to see the full list of sets (this is a large XML file):
Here is an example of harvesting the metadata records about Economics, based on their subject metadata. All the sub-topics of economics will be included in the harvest.
Metadata Prefixes
The nzresearch.org.nz OAI-PMH server supports two special metadata types: nzir_internal and nzir_admin. These are used to code NZIR Internal Metadata and NZIR Administrative metadata respectively.
The NZIR Administrative metadata is particularly useful. We can use it to get an OAI-PMH feed of all of the metadata errors found by nzresearch.org.nz with a request like this:
Institutional Repository administrators can combine the nzir_admin metadata prefix with the OAI-PMH set to get a list of all of the metadata errors in their repository. For example, for respository 68, the request looks like this:
Note this will be an empty set if the repository has no metadata errors
