To to ensure that these tools really do work within more than one institution, the participating institutions have to apply the same standards. A central infrastructure, enabling institutions to share information and software, is necessary.

Within CATCHPlus, the first steps have been taken to help implement OAI-PMH and to introduce persistent identifiers within the participating heritage institutions.

OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH is a widely used protocol, that makes metadata (for instance from heritage catalogues) available for periodical, incremental downloads. These metadata are publicized according to the Dublin Core standard format as a minimum condition. This means that, in most cases, data conversion on the spot is necessary before harvesting can take place.

Several CATCHPlus subprojects run on catalogue data. The introduction of OAI and harvesting ensures that the results of these subprojects can run on catalogue data from different institutions in a standardized way. Read more >>

Persistent Identifiers
Archiving systems and other information systems within heritage institutions contain many objects that need to be able to be referenced to. These objects therefore have a name or a number: an identifier.

Usually these identifiers are unique only in the context of one specific information system; sometimes that’s not even the case.

Further on, identifiers are often subject to change, for instance when data are moved, exported or migrated to a new database management system.

All in all, identifiers often fail to be persistent. This is a problem if references are made from elsewhere using the identifier. The growing importance of internet and the web, and of cooperation initiatives such as CATCHPlus, amplifies these problems.

A lot of referencing takes place in CATCHPlus subprojects , especially when the subproject uses collective services. An important task for the project office is therefore to realize services for persistence and to stimulate application of these services. Read more >>