Old Dominion University and Los Alamos National Laboratory announce the launch
of the "mod_oai" project
For immediate release April 12, 2004
Norfolk VA & Los Alamos NM - The
Computer Science Department of Old Dominion University and the Research Library
of the Los Alamos National Laboratory announce the launch of the "mod_oai" project. The
aim of the project is to create the mod_oai Apache software module that will
expose content accessible from Apache Web servers via the Open Archives Initiative
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting(OAI-PMH). The mod_oai project is generously
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Apache is an open-source Web server that is used by 63% -
approximately 27 million - of the Websites in the world. The OAI-PMH is
a protocol to selectively harvest from data repositories. The
protocol has had a considerable impact in the field of digital libraries but
it has yet to be embraced by the general Web community. The mod_oai project
hopes to achieve such broader acceptance by making the power and efficiency of
the OAI-PMH available to Web servers and Web crawlers. For example, the
planned OAI-PMH interface to Apache Web servers should allow responding to requests
to collect all files added or changed since a specified date, or all files that
are of a specified MIME-type.
The Apache Web server defines an extensible module format that allows specific
functionality to be incorporated directly into the Web server.
The mod_oai project will build such an Apache module that is able to respond
to OAI-PMH requests pertaining to files made accessible by the Apache server.
The mod_oai module will be developed under the GNU Public License (GPL) and distributed
through sourceforge.net upon completion.
More information about the mod_oai project can be found
at http://www.modoai.org.
Contact: Michael Nelson at mln@cs.odu.edu and
Herbert Van de Sompel at herbertv@lanl.gov. |