Digital Commonwealth is a statewide union catalog of digital objects held by Massachusetts libraries and cultural institutions. The Digital Commonwealth harvests metadata from participating repositories, including NOBLE’s Digital Library, and provides a single index. Clicking on results takes the user to the record on the local system.
Definitions
Metadata
Structured information about resources (including both digital and non-digital resources). Metadata can be used to help support a wide range of operations on those resources. In the context of services based on metadata harvested via OAI-PMH, the most common operation is discovery and retrieval of resources.
OAI : Open Archive Initiative
OAI is an initiative to develop and promote standards that make it easier to share content across systems
OAI-PMH: OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
OAI-PMH is a protocol for the automated collection of metadata. It’s the protocol that the Digital Commonwealth will use to collect metadata from the NOBLE Digital Library and other repositories around the state