OAI manual Introduction

The OAI console harvester is a standalone tool that you can easily install on any computer. It has been developed to enable:

• test the access to your OAI-PMH repository via which you want to forward your content to the Archives Portal Europe,
• harvest the whole content of your OAI-PMH repository in order to upload it to the Archives Portal Europe's Content Checker for testing purposes, because the automatic harvesting functionality of the Content Checker is limited to fetch the first ten records of any OAI-PMH dataset.

So the OAI console harvester tool helps you to test your Archives Portal Europe contribution, just like the Data Preparation Tool. In addition: you can use the OAI console harvester tool in combination with any other OAI-PMH repository, for example: Europeana uses it to harvest the EDM datasets from the Archives Portal Europe's OAI-PMH repository.

The OAI console harvester tool works just like the harvester functionality implemented in the back-end of the Archives Portal Europe, the Dashboard. They share the same 'engine', but the tool has some more options. Basically it follows the OAI-PMH protocol via a questions and answers dialogue between the harvester functionality and the repository.

The only requirement that is needed for running the tool is that you need to have Java 6 or higher installed on your computer. You can verify whether Java is installed on your computer and which version by launching the command prompt (Windows) or terminal (Linux) and typing: java -version. On a MacIntosh computer you can go to 'system preferences' and see if there is a Java icon there, if so, Java is installed and you can click on the icon to check the version. Of course you will also need an internet connection and free access to your OAI-PMH repository via that internet connection to actually harvest data.