“Archeologia e Calcolatori” is an OAI data provider. Among the articles published in the twenty-year editorial activity, at present more than 100 can be freely downloaded in .pdf format from the journal website. They are regularly indexed by OAI service providers and specific search tools (e.g. OAISTER) and are also present in the indexes of Google and the main search engines.

The “Archeologia e Calcolatori”  repository is not based on Dspace or Eprints – the two most common softwares for the creation of OAI-PMH compliant repository – but on an original software developed by ISCIMA, called OAISISTEMA. It implements, on a Microsoft IIS webserver, the Static Repository specification that provides a simple approach for exposing relatively stable and small collections of metadata records through the OAI-PMH.

The repository “Archeologia e Calcolatori-published articles” has been the first direct implementation of an institutional Static Repository to appear in Open Archives as a Data Provider. Simeon Warner brought it to the attention of the OAI-implementers distribution list with a post on 24 February 2005.

The OAISISTEMA is made up of various interconnected services – for the most part developed in XML and XSL – as well as a small amount of server side Vbscript routines for IIS/ASP. Besides enabling OAI service providers to harvest by OAI-PMH, OAISISTEMA also aims to efficiently expose the repository contents to generic search engines. In order to maximise diffusion and searchability on the web of the shared resources, a specific XML-XSL solution, designed to draw web crawlers to index our repository, has been successfully implemented.

Our system has proved to be completely satisfactory in such a task. From a study conducted in 2006 by the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the online coverage by generic search tools of documents deposited in OAI repositories, the “Archeologia e Calcolatori” repository, based on OAISISTEMA, was found to be the first among those sampled (100% of indexed resources), with an admirable and unequalled efficacy, despite the simplicity of approach.

The digitalisation of cultural patrimony, aimed at obtaining the diffusion of contents on the Internet, creates various questions about the accessibility and usability aspects of web applications. For this reason, the website of “Archeologia e Calcolatori” follows the rules of the Quality Principles for Cultural Web Sites issued by Minerva Project and more generally the recommendations for usability and accessibility of contents defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.



References for OAISISTEMA

Barchesi C. 2005, «Archeologia e Calcolatori»: Nuove strategie per la diffusione di contenuti in rete sulla base dell’OAI-PMH, «Archeologia e Calcolatori», 16, 225-241.

Barchesi C. 2005, Verso la costituzione di un  portale OAI per gli studi sulle civiltà italiche e del Mediterraneo antico, presented in GARR2005 - La rete daPERtutto (Pisa 2005).

BarchesiC. 2007, OAIsistema. A simple solution for implementing OAI-PMH on small size archives of archaeological documents, in Alexandra Figueiredo and Gonçalo Velho (editors), The World is in Your Eyes – CAA2005 - Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology: Proceedings of the 33rd Conference, Tomar, March 2005, CAAPortugal, Tomar, 2007, pp. 109-114.

Moscati P., Barchesi C., Pasquini R., Archeologia e Calcolatori and the OAI-PMH, Poster session  of  International Conference – Museums, libraries and archives online: MICHAEL Service and other initiative, 4-5 dicembre 2006, Roma Complesso del S. Michele -Sala dello Stenditoio.



Additional References

The Open Archives Initiatives.

Lagoze C., Van de Sompel H., The Open Archives Initiative: Building a low-barrier interoperability framework, in Proceedings of the First ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Roanoke, VA, 54-62.

Lagoze C., Van de Sompel H., Nelson M., Warner S. 2004, The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, version 2.0.

Van de Sompel H., Lagoze C., Nelson M., Warner S., Hochstenbach P., Jerez H. 2004, Specification for an OAI Static Repository and an OAI Static Repository Gateway.

McCown F., Liu X., Nelson M.L., Zubair M. 2006, Search Engine Coverage of the OAI-PMH Corpus, IEEE Internet Computing, 10, 2, 66-73 (OAI preprint accessible here).