Basque demo of a OAI harvester and data-provider

This is a demo of a OAI harvester and data-provider. Its purpose is showing the capabilities of such a system, in this case offering a multilingual interface, applied to the context of the Basque Country and the Basque-language cultural production.

We used free software to do it, mainly ZOpenArchives and Localizer (Zope products) to produce the multilingual interface. ZOpenArchives is an OAI implementation for Zope that transforms Zope into an OAI Data Provider and Aggregator. Collaborative project

This Demo is the result of a collaborative project between CodeSyntax and DELi, a research group from the University of Deusto. The demo shows the capacity of OAI to function both as a data harvester (that includes a search interface) and as a data provider

The collection of OAI records used for this demo were kindly provided by several Basque institutions and publishers. Beware that most of the references correspond to Basque records, and general-purpose searches in English will not produce too much results... Follow the tips at the search page to obtain meaningful results.

The Basque context

Our purpose is to show in our local context that a Digital Library based on OAI's makes much sense. A minority language, Basque, where resources are many times scarce: it makes sense to promote a distributed model for a digital library. In our vision, a Basque digital library should not be like this:

Not a central mainframe center, with gigantic centralised resources that everyone else should fill following N protocols... Rather, that Library should follow this model:

That's the hydrography map of a Basque region. Each council or county has its own responsability to maintain its own realtively small reservoirs. Then, there's a network connecting them. No need to feed a central system: anytime it rains here or there, water pours on the general system.

That could be the model for a Library, yes! Each one publishes its own records according to its resources, following the standard, and the network becomes the Library then.

What RSS is to news, OAI can be for books, cultural items, documentation at large... I am convinced of that. More about OAI at OpenArchives.org

Thanks

The following Basque organisations have contributed data to this demo:

• Badihardugu euskara elkartea, an association devoted to the study of local varieties of the Basque language.
• Gaztelupeko Hotsak, a music recording company.
• Gerediaga elkartea organiser of the Durango Fair.
• Inguma, a scientific database from the Basque Summer University Programme UEU.
• Megadenda.com, an online vendor set up by the book-distributing company Zabaltzen. The Basque publisher Elkar and its related software company Plazagunea have also contributed.
• Ibinagabeitia proiektua, a Basque online archive of literary journals developed by the publishing house Susa together with the ASP software company.
• Lanbide Ekimena, which is a documentation project for vocational training in the Basque Country, and is supported by several institutions: Hetel, Ikaslan, the Basque Government, BBK, Elhuyar and the regional administrations of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia.

This OAI demo and the OAC project have the suppor of the Saiotek Research Programme from the Industry Department of the Basque Government.