Open Archives API » Open Archives OAI-PMH data provider

The genealogical data available via Open Archives is also provided (with some exclusions) as an OAI-PMH metadata feed (other API's are also available). This feed is an implementation of an OAI-PMH Data Provider, based op OAI-PMH 2.0, including on-the-fly GZIP compression. The metadata is structured via the Archives 2 All (A2A) model.

Base URL of the Open Archives repository

http://api.openarchieven.nl/oai-pmh/

Available OAI-PMH verbs (methods)

The standard OAI-PMH verbs which are applicable on this repository are:

  • Identify asks the repository to provide a description of itself
  • ListMetadataFormats asks the repository to return a list of supported metadata formats
  • ListSets asks the repository to return a list of available sets
  • ListRecords asks the repository to return all (*) the records in a data repository
  • ListIdentifiers is the same as ListRecords but only returns the headers
  • GetRecord asks the repository to return a single record

* the optional parameters 'from' and 'until' can be used to filter data on date of last change.

About the data

Open Archives collects genealogical data from two types of sources:

  • The first is coming from archives which make their genealogical data available for re-use (=open data).
  • The second is coming from independant researchers and volunteers who have indexed data sources which they published themselves and are not available from archives.

Creative Commons LicenseThe data provided via this data provider is licensed under a Creative Commons 0 License (Public Domain Dedication). This means you can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. It's appreciated if you contact Open Archives when harvesting/using this data set, maybe we can mean even more for each other!

The data set contains URL's to images and images viewers of third parties, the CC0 license doesn't span those items! Please lookup which license is attached to that material on the website of the relevant third party.

Some datasets are excluded from this dataprovider due to legal or technical reasons, or just because it was kindly requested. Currently the VOC data from GaHetNa are excluded.

For questions and remarks about this data provider please contact Open Archives.

What is OAI-PMH?

OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) is a protocol developed by the Open Archives Initiative. It is used to harvest (or collect) the metadata descriptions of the records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. OAI-PMH uses XML over HTTP.

More info: Open Archives Initiative

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