Bibliothèque La Pérouse   Avano  Version française   Back

How does it work? Since the beginning of the 90's and in order to counteract abusive commercial politics found in some scientific publishers, scientific communities created pre-print servers to provide free and immediate access to their work (ex : ArXiv, for Physics and RePec, for Economics). In 2001, the OAI organisation (Open Archive Initiative) formalised an interrogation protocol for those archives. The goal of the OAI-PMH (Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol is to allow the interoperability of Open Archives. Rightly so, if the Archives could not communicate with one another, a user would need to interrogate each archive one after the other in order to find a document. Since archive projects are multiplying fast, it is becoming impossible to efficiently conduct a search by using this method. To simplify the access to documentation available in the archives, the OAI-PMH protocol defines two roles: Data providers create archives, therefore providing access to resources they enter. OAI-PMH compatible archives allow to collect (or harvest) bibliographical data of their resources through a series of standardised commands defined in the OAI-PMH protocol. Technically speaking the archives receive those commands via http and respond to them still via http, in XML. Service providers can collect bibliographical data from several archives and gather them in order to create their own database. Therefore, this enables their users to interrogate databases corresponding to entire or partial archives. As an example, the Oaister database indexes all of more than 700 archives. Lastly, those databases offer hypertext links to full-text documents which remain hosted on the archive servers. Avano is an OAI harvester for Marine and Aquatic Sciences. Therefore, it collects bibliographical data of electronic resources (documentation, images, datasets...) available in a group of Open Archives via the OAI-PMH protocol in order to aggregate them into a centralised database. Its Web interface offers centralised viewing of resources disseminated throughout several servers. Avano harvests many archives from Marine Science research institutes. All resources stored in those specialised Marine Science archives are systematically and automatically referenced in Avano. Avano also interrogates a group of open archives not specialised in Marine Science in which are stored, among others, a group of resources linked to Marine and Aquatic resources. To process archives which are not perfectly categorised within our fields of interest, Avano uploads all of their records in a temporary database. Those databases are indexed and an automatic system isolates records that contain one or several terms linked to Marine or Aquatic Sciences. Records spotted by this key-word system are then manually validated by librarians before they can be visible via Avano. To validate those records, librarians use a Web site. Key-words found in records are highlighted. This system allows librarians to reject index files when key-words are not related to our field of interest (for example when Fish is used for Fluorescence in situ hybridization). For more technical information about Avano see : Set up an Institutional Repository and an OAI harvester for marine and aquatic sciences, at Ifremer