Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE)

Michael Witt

Jan 2010 · American Library Association

About this ebook

If your job involves working with digital content, your need to make sense of interoperable digital information by managing resources with care and quality metadata and by connecting users to resources—and resources to resources—is greater than ever. In this issue of Library Technology Reports, Michael Witt helps you do just that. If you are an Electronic Resources Librarian, Digital Archivist or work with Digital Catalogs in any capacity, this report is a must-read for you.The Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange specification defines a set of new standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of web resources. This presents an exciting opportunity to revisit how digital libraries are managing. ORE and its concept of aggregation—that a set of digital objects of different types and from different locations on the web can be described and exposed together as a single, compound entity—may present the next major disruptive technology for librarians who develop and manage collections of digital information. This technology could change your job.Michael Witt is the interdisciplinary research librarian and assistant professor of library science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and an expert on the technology behind digital content management. Through real-world examples, extensive diagrams and careful explanation, he details the potential of this exciting new technology, and how it can make the management and searching of your digital content more effective and efficient.

About the author

Michael Witt is the Interdisciplinary Research Librarian and an assistant professor of library science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He is also a senior researcher at the Distributed Data Curation Center. Michael has spoken about new roles for librarians in curating research datasets and applying library science principles to e-science in workshops and presentations at national conferences such as the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Technology Forum, Educause, Open Repositories, the Special Libraries Association, and the Coalition for Networked Information. In 2011, he will spend five months at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. His research has been published in journals such as The International Journal of Digital Curation, Library Trends, College & Undergraduate Libraries, and The International Journal on Digital Libraries. He is a graduate of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University-Indianapolis, and he was named an Emerging Leader by the American Library Association in 2008.