Community Standards

Libraries and library systems at Harvard use community standards and best practices to establish quality baselines, facilitate cooperation among libraries and between libraries and other organizations both within and outside the university, and enable the exchange of data between systems.
Types of standards include metadata dictionaries, content standards, protocols, reformatting guidelines, controlled vocabularies, file format definitions, application profiles, APIs and others. Key standards used in the Harvard libraries and in related parts of the university include those for

Metadata Standards
File Formats and Digital Reformatting Guidelines
Protocols for Searching and Harvesting

File Formats and Digital Reformatting Guidelines

For information about File Formats and Digital Reformatting, please see the File Formats & Guidelines page on the Digital Preservation section of the OIS web site.

Protocols for Searching and Harvesting

• Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
  Using OAI-PMH, data providers expose metadata about their resources, and service providers harvest that metadata in order to provide value-added services.
  Harvard makes metadata for several of its databases generally available through OAI, uses OAI to provide metadata to ARTstor, and uses OAI to build Harvard Virtual Collections.
• OpenURL
  The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services defines a model for identifying a resource and requesting a service. OpenURLs package metadata about a resource into a URL and point to a user-specific resolver. OpenURLs are commonly used to link to an appropriate copy for a given user, although they are used to provide other services.
  OpenURL underlies FindIt@Harvard, which uses SFX technology to link from citations to full text resources.
• Z39.50
  The Z39.50 protocol defines procedures and formats for a client to search a database on a server, retrieve database records, and perform related information retrieval functions. Technical services staff use Z39.50 in Aleph to search for metadata in other databases, and authorized outside organizations can use Z39.50 to search HOLLIS