Approaches to make CDS/ISIS Databases Interoperable With other Digital Libraries

One of the biggest obstacles for information dissemination to a user community is that many Digital Libraries (DL) or bibliographic databases use heterogeneous technologies that inhibit interoperability. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) addresses interoperability by using a framework to facilitate the discovery of content stored in distributed archives or bibliographic databases through the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Though OAI-PMH is becoming the de facto standard for digital libraries, some of the legacy database systems, for a variety of reasons are still not OAI-compliant. One such database system is the CDS/ISIS, which was designed specifically for handling bibliographic/textual information efficiently. It was developed and is being maintained by UNESCO since 1985, and is available as free software in binary form for different OS platforms. Fulbright fellow, on leave from NCSI, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. CDS/ISIS is quite widely used by the Library and Information Science community. There is a need for making CDS/ISIS databases OAI-compliant to enable sharing of metadata and thus leading to better federated discovery services for end-users. In this paper, we describe two approaches for making CDS/ISIS databases OAI-compliant. Both the approaches are based on the concept of Static Repository (SR). In the first approach CDS/ISIS records are converted into an OAI static repository format and then the static repository file is imported into the Kepler archivelet, a light-weight, easy-to-install OAIcompliant archive. In the second approach, a static repository becomes OAI-compliant through the intermediation of a static repository gateway.