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Standards for Web Content Interoperability

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) developed and promoted interoperability standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The roots of OAI lie in the open access and institutional repository movements. Over time, however, the work of OAI expanded to promote broad access to digital resources for eScholarship, eLearning, and eScience.

The Open Archives Initiative is no longer working on new projects but this website and the associated specifications continue to be maintained. OAI-PMH was first released in 2001 and remains widely used within library and academic communities. From OAI-ORE the vocabulary for aggregation and associated data model are most widely used. The ResourceSync specification is formally standardized as ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2017. See also the OAI news archive.


Support for Open Archives Initiative activities has come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information, the Digital Library Federation, Microsoft Corporation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and from the National Science Foundation (IIS-9817416 and IIS-0430906).

Support for the Open Archives Initiative website is provided by the Cornell University Library Information Technology.