Resumo de Sharing History Of Medicine Metadata Using The Oai Protocol

Sharing History Of Medicine Metadata Using The OAI Protocol
The principal aim of this paper would be to examine and evaluate an approach to Sharing metadata relating to historical Internet resources between a selection of resource Discovery Network (RDN) hubs aimed at different communities. It will be based upon the experiences of the MedHist history of medicine gateway, developed by the Wellcome Library, which aims to make its records available either in full or as a subset to the humanities and social science gateways, using the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata exposure and harvesting.
The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, in cooperation with the Biome hub is currently developing a gateway to Internet resources in the history of medicine. The MedHist gateway, as it will be known, will be launched in July 2002 and will provide access to assessed high-quality Internet resources relating to the history of medicine. MedHist is aimed primarily, but not exclusively, at students and academics working within the further and higher education sectors with an interest in the history of medicine. MedHist's records will be available via its own Website, the Biome Website < http://biome.ac.uk> and via the RDN central Resource Finder database < http://www.rdn.ac.uk> , and via other RDN hubs that have expressed an interest in having access to them, namely the Humbul humanities hub and Sosig social sciences
As the history of medicine is a broad and interdisciplinary subject that does not fit comfortably within any existing academic discipline, resources relevant to the history of medicine are also of use to specialists in other areas, including humanities scholars with an interest in the history of science, or in social and cultural history. For this reason, the sharing of MedHist's resources with other gateways is very important. This paper will outline the communities with a potential interest in the history of medicine in order to illustrate this point.
The essentially broad nature of the history of medicine raised an important issue for the MedHist team at the Wellcome Trust; namely where the gateway would "fit in" with similar resource discovery services within the Resource Discovery Network. It was decided that instead of being a completely independent service operating outside of the RDN, in order for it to reach a larger audience, the MedHist gateway should be associated with an existing RDN service, and that MedHist records should also be made available to other gateways wishing to have access to them using a suitable form of resource sharing technology. Reasons for situating the gateway within the Biome hub will be briefly discussed.
This paper will address the technical and intellectual approaches to metadata sharing and re-presentation undertaken by those involved in the project. MedHist records will be made available to other gateways via the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting; the protocol currently used by the RDN to gather the records from individual gateways into its central Resource Finder repository. An overview of the technical processes involved will be provided and there will be a discussion of the benefits of employing OAI in this particular context over other approaches to metadata sharing, such as live cross-searching. This approach to metadata sharing will be examined in relation to current developments and strategic thinking in this area within the RDN and beyond.

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