OAI-PMH Registering as a Data Provider - Discontinued

Registration of OAI-PMH conforming repositories has been discontinued (2025-07-18). Repository validation is supported.

A gzipped XML dump of historical registration data is available. The adminEmail and email values in this have been modified to obscure the local-part (before @ replaced with deleted).

Validation Process - Protocol Testing

The OAI-PMH defines a set of requests and the format of the responses to each of these requests, specified through an XML schema. A conformant repository must respond to each of the protocol requests with a response that validates with the schema. It also must respond to malformed requests with the appropriate errors and exception conditions.

Conformance Testing for Basic Functionality

A repository must successfully complete the following tests in order to validate successfully:

For every protocol request, the repository return a response that:

• is valid XML (the XML successfully passes through an XML parser)
• conforms to the XML schema defined for the response

For the ListMetadataFormats request, the repository must:

• return at least one metadata format.
• in the list of metadata formats, return the mandatory oai_dc metadata format with the URL of the OAI-defined XML schema.

For the ListIdentifiers request, the repository must:

• return at least one identifier in a record header.

For the GetRecord request, the repository must:

• return a record with metadata in the required oai_dc format, given an identifier returned by the ListIdentifiers request.

Conformance Testing for Error and Exception Handling

A repository must successfully complete the following tests for error and exception handling in order to validate successfully.

A conformant repository must return a badVerb error code when:

• the verb argument is missing from the request.
• the verb argument is not a legal OAI-PMH verb.

A conformant repository must return a badArgument error code when:

• the identifier argument is missing or is not a valid URI in a GetRecord request.
• the metadataPrefix argument is missing in a GetRecord request.
• the until or from arguments are illegal in a ListIdentifiers request.
• the resumptionToken argument is issued as a non-exclusive argument to a ListIdentifiers request.
• a ListRecords request is submitted without a metadataPrefix.

A conformant repository must return a noRecordsMatch error code when:

• a ListRecords request is issued with a date range (from and until arguments) from which there are no records that can be disseminated from the repository.

A conformant repository must return a cannotDisseminateFormat error code when:

• a GetRecord request is issued with a metadataPrefix that is not one of the valid metadata prefixes for the repository.

A conformant repository must return a badResumptionToken error code when:

• a ListRecords request is issued with a resumption token that was not received in a preceding protocol response.

Using OAI Identifiers for Metadata Records

Every metadata record harvested by the OAI-PMH has a unique identifier. The only restriction for conformance is that this identifier should be a URI that is unique within the respective repository. Data providers may choose, however, to adopt the OAI identifier scheme whereby their identifiers are globally unique within the oai namespace. The advantage for repositories of adopting this naming convention is that record identifiers are resolvable via future resolution services. OAI identifiers are formally defined at http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai-identifier.xsd.

An example OAI identifier is:

oai:arXiv.org:hep-th/9901001

In order to declare your intention to use OAI identifiers, you must do the following (there was previously registration of namespace-identifier values along with repository registration, but this has been discontinued 2025-07-18):

• insert into your response to the Identify request the description package that defines your repository as a user of OAI identifiers.
• Supply as a value to the namespace-identifier element in that description package your domain-name. You may find it helpful to check the left-hand column of the data provider list first, to make sure your choice is unique to you.

Note: declaration of an OAI identifier scheme does not commit you to using those types of identifiers for all of your records.