EAD and OAI-PMH

As related in a previous post, EAD does not "play well with OAI-PMH."

OAI, the Open Archives Initiative-Protocols for Metadata Harvesting(www.openarchives.org) is an organization of college-level librarians dedicated to making electronic materials publically available and mutually translatable. Contrary to the title, using the word "archives," OAI has little to actually do with archives. The Society of American Archivists does not bless the OAI project.

From examining OAI's website, there are some issues in the OAI-EAD relationship. For its part, OAI gives less attention to EAD than it does other metadata schemes. For their part, archivists rarely try to make their finding aids EAD compliant. (for verification of this, go to http://web.library.uiuc.edu/ahx/workpap/MARAC03.pdf). Quoting Chris Prom, a pro-OAI archivist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne, "We 'real' archivists have a lot ot learn from those who are implementing [OAI]"

Archivists have their own reasons for not embracing OAI. According to William Landis, OAI fudges a finding aid's description of provenance and original order. As ("Nuts and Bolts: Implementing Descriptive Standards to Enable Virtual Collections," Journal of Archival Organization, Journal of Archival Organization.)

A basic problem with OAI for EAD is that OAI is focused on making metadata for specific items, where archivists are more concerned with context, the order of the documents, and overall collections.

To give a specific example, EAD is capable of differentiating letters to Mark Twain, from Mark Twain, and about Mark Train. Other metadata schemes, the kinds that OAI is made for, do not handle the to, from, about issue as well.