«Archeologia e Calcolatori»: nuove strategie per la diffusione di contenuti in rete sulla base dell OAI-PMH

A project for digitalization and web diffusion of the journal «Archeologia e Calcolatori» contents has been recently started. While PDF seems to be the most satisfactory data format to deliver the electronic version of documents, international standards developed within the Open Archives paradigm can surely offer fascinating solutions to disseminate metadata describing their content. The most relevant protocol for Open Archives implementation is OAI-PMH. Several software applications to support OAI-PMH have been proposed by different institutions and some obtained a brilliant success. However, in certain situations the deployment of an OAI-PMH conformant repository is still problematic. The reason ranges from lack of technical expertise, cost of implementation and intrinsic complexity of web server administration. For small research institutions and university departments the most part of the existing OAI applications seems in effect not simple to implement. In this paper a simplified approach to OAI implementation for small and medium size archives is discussed. This project is based on an OAI Static Repository file (OAI-SR, i.e. an XML file based on a schema whose guidelines have been recently issued by OAI), Visual Basic, ASP, XML/XSL and Java technologies. It has been applied to the collection of abstracts coming from the articles published in «Archeologia e Calcolatori», but it can easily be adapted to other cultural subjects with small efforts.