EHRI Harvesting Overview

One of EHRI's principal goals is to create sustainable connections between partner archives and the EHRI portal to allow metadata to be automatically harvested from the former to the latter.

At present, EHRI does this in two ways:

OAI-PMH

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is an XML-over-HTTP protocol that allows servers to expose metadata about their holdings in a standardised manner. If the archival institution exposes EAD files via OAI-PMH (a fairly restrictive requirement) we can ingest it into the portal.

ResourceSync

ResourceSync is a specification that describes how to expose a set of resources (in our case, EAD files) that can be synchronised by third-parties.