Adding OAI--ORE Support to Repository Platforms

The Texas Digital Library is a cooperative initiative of Texas universities. One of TDL’s core services is a federated collection of ETDs from its member schools. As this collection grew, the need for tools to manage the content exchange from the local to the federated repository became evident. This paper presents our experiences adding harvesting support to the DSpace repository platform using the ORE and PMH protocols from the Open Archives Initiative. We describe our use case for a statewide ETD repository and the mapping of the OAI-ORE data model to the DSpace architecture. We discuss our implementation that adds both dissemination and harvesting functionality to the repository. We conclude by discussing the architectural flexibility added to the TDL repository through this project.