OLAC Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

[Gary Simons]

Dear OLAC-Implementers,

Those of you who were at the workshop last December where OLAC was founded
will recall that the group proposed an alpha testing period during which we
would develop the basic standards, followed by an official launch, followed
by a one year freeze of the standards which would serve as a period of beta
testing and more widespread adoption.  At the end of the freeze, the
standards would be revised based on feedback from implementers, and
released as version 1.0.

Our first launch event, a symposium at the annual meeting of the
Linguistics Society of America, is now three weeks away.  There are
three standards documents that define OLAC and how it works:

Process:
  http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/process.html
Metadata set:
  http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/olacms.html
Harvesting protocol:
  http://www.language-archives.org/OLAC/protocol.html

The first two should be familiar as they have been circulated on this
list before. The third is new; it describes the extensions that OLAC
makes to the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting.  Currently all
three documents have "Proposed" status.  According to our process
document, the next status is "Candidate" during which a standard
undergoes a period of testing before final adoption.  Our plan is to
advance these documents to Candidate status before the launch in
January.

Another feature of our process is that you, the implementers, have the
major stake in setting the standards.  We thus encourage you to review
these proposed standards one more time and give any feedback you have
concerning revisions you think should be incorporated into the
versions that will be shortly frozen for a year.

The new document on the harvesting protocol we particularly encourage you
to look at. One part will require each of you implementers to modify your
data provider.  This is the proposed <olac-archive> element used for
archive description in the Identify response.  You may recall that the OAI
protocol has a repeatable <description> element in the Identify response
that is designed for subcommunities to customize. This new document
proposes our community's customization.

OLAC is one year old this week.  We thank you for your support, and for
helping get the initiative off to a great start.

Best wishes,
Gary & Steven

________
Steven Bird, University of Pennsylvania (sb at ldc.upenn.edu)
Gary Simons, SIL International (gary_simons at sil.org)
OLAC Coordinators (www.language-archives.org)