ruby-oai

ruby-oai is a Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) library for Ruby. OAI-PMH[http://openarchives.org] it is a somewhat archaic protocol for sharing metadata between digital library repositories. If you are looking to share metadata on the web you are probably better off using a feed format like RSS or Atom. If have to work with a backwards digital repository that only offers OAI-PMH access then ruby-oai is your friend.

The OAI-PMH spec defines six verbs (Identify, ListIdentifiers, ListRecords, GetRecords, ListSets, ListMetadataFormat) used for discovery and sharing of metadata.

The ruby-oai gem includes a client library, a server/provider library and a interactive harvesting shell.

Client

The OAI client library is used for harvesting metadata from repositories. For example to initiate a ListRecords request to pubmed you can:

  require 'oai'
  client = OAI::Client.new 'http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/oai/oai.cgi'
  for record in client.list_records
    puts record.metadata
  end

See OAI::Client for more details

Server

The OAI provider library handles serving local content to other clients. Here's how to set up a simple provider:

  class MyProvider < Oai::Provider
    repository_name 'My little OAI provider'
    repository_url  'http://localhost/provider'
    record_prefix 'oai:localhost'
    admin_email 'root@localhost'   # String or Array
    source_model MyModel.new       # Subclass of OAI::Provider::Model
  end

See OAI::Provider for more details

Interactive Harvester

The OAI-PMH client shell allows OAI Harvesting to be configured in an interactive manner. Typing 'oai' on the command line starts the shell. After initial configuration, the shell can be used to manage harvesting operations.

See OAI::Harvester::Shell for more details

Installation

Normally the best way to install oai is from rubyforge using the gem command line tool:

  % gem install oai

If you're reading this you've presumably got the tarball or zip distribution. So you'll need to:

  % rake package
  % gem install pkg/oai-x.y.z.gem 

Where x.y.z is the version of the gem that was generated.

License

Public Domain