Announcing Perseus Open Archives Initiative Services

6 May 2002

The Perseus Project is pleased to announce the first release of its Open Archives Initiative service provider. The OAI promotes digital library interoperability through use of its harvesting protocol, which allows digital repositories to exchange information about their documents. While the OAI has its roots in the scientific e-print community, many cultural heritage organizations are now also providing their data.

The Perseus system harvests registered OAI repositories and incorporates the information into its search interface. Some sample searches:

• search for "Shakespeare", grouped by collection. Note that not all resources have web-accessible content.

• search for "cloning", dynamically clustered by repeated phrases. Note the different phrases associated with cloning: "molecular cloning", "amino acid", "quantum information".

• search for "Goethe", grouped by matching field. Books by Goethe are separated from information about Goethe.

For documents that are web-accessible, Perseus creates two links: one directly to the outside page, and one with added Perseus links. As with texts in Perseus, these links point back to related resources in the digital library.

Users can also exclude OAI results by de-selecting the "include external sites" option.

Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.

Open Archives: information about this service provider