Achieving OAI PMH compliancy for CDS/ISIS databases

CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information retrieval System of United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which is widely used for managing bibliographical reference ensuring high quality content. The main purpose of this paper is to present the work recently carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make Web CDS/ISIS based applications compliant to the OAI-PMH. After a brief evaluation of some of the existing solutions, the paper describes the methodology chosen and proposes an open source, easily parametrizable plugin tool, which can be adapted to expose metadata from a general structure CDS/ISIS database using the OAI-PMH protocol. It concludes with expressing the importance and implications of this work for the whole CDS/ISIS community and specifically for the participating centres from the AGRIS network. In addition, this work assures that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the “AGRIS Application Profile” can be handled by the OAI protocol.