OAI-PMH

 OAI-PMH is a “harvesting” protocol through which external applications can regularly and automatically gather metadata newly made available, for instance on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Through such an access, ISSN records are made available in ways which can be easily and fully automated, as well as potentially customized based on specific user profiles, so that external applications can benefit from the wealth of data present in our database.

It can:
• increase the visibility of digital collections on the Internet
• rebuild virtually whole corpuses from resources available on various sites,
• feed thematic portals.

 OAI-PMH defines two types of actors:
• data providers, who make available their metadata on a web server called "warehouse"
• and service providers who collect (or also "harvest") these data and index them in order to provide an extended and controlled wealth of information made accessible from their own digital libraries.

The OAI-PMH basic operation relies on a communication from client to server. The client sends requests to the http server, the server responds with an XML data flow.