I want to share this very important announcement with CNI-announce subscribers. This effort follows up on the joint Mellon/Microsoft/CNI/JISC/DLF  meeting that was held in the spring to explore repository interoperability (information on the meeting, including the final report, is at http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/ ), and establishes a framework for developing and validating solutions to increasingly urgent interoperability problems, It builds upon the context and strategies that have been used so successfully in earlier Open Archives Initiative work on the protocol for metadata harvesting.

There will be a presentation on this effort at the December CNI member meeting, and I expect that CNI will be contributing to the advancement of this work in a number of ways going foward.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Open Archives Initiative Announces Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE)

Ithaca, NY and Los Alamos, NM - The Open Archives Initiative (OAI), with
the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, announces a new
effort as part of its mission to develop and promote interoperability
standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.
Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) will develop specifications that allow
distributed repositories to exchange information about their constituent
digital objects. These specifications will include approaches for
representing digital objects and repository services that facilitate
access and ingest of these representations. The specifications will
enable a new generation of cross-repository services that leverage the
intrinsic value of digital objects beyond the borders of hosting
repositories.

The goals of ORE are inspired by advances in scholarly communication and
the growth of scholarly material that is available in scholarly
repositories including institutional repositories, discipline-oriented
repositories, dataset warehouses, and online journal repositories. This
growth is significant by itself. However, its real importance lies in
the potential for these distributed repositories and their contained
objects to act as the foundation of a new digitally-based scholarly
communication framework. Such a framework would permit fluid reuse,
refactoring, and aggregation of scholarly digital objects and their
constituent parts - including text, images, data, and software. This
framework would include new forms of citation, allow the creation of
virtual collections of objects regardless of their location, and
facilitate new workflows that add value to scholarly objects by
distributed registration, certification, peer review, and preservation
services. Although scholarly communication is the motivating
application, we imagine that the specifications developed by ORE may
extend to other domains.

ORE is funded by Mellon for two years beginning October 2006. It is
coordinated by Carl Lagoze of Cornell University Information Science and
Herbert Van de Sompel of the Los Alamos Research Library.  The ORE
two-year work plan includes:

* Formation of an international advisory committee, consisting of
leaders in e-Science, institutional repositories, publishing, library,
and educational technology communities.
* Formation of an international working group that will meet over the
two year period and develop the set of ORE specifications.
* Establishment and management of an experimental deployment community
that will exercise the developed standards in a variety of contexts.
* Establishment of a sustainable community to support the widespread
deployment and management of the standards fabric.

OAI-ORE will co-exist within the Open Archives Initiative with the
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), the widely deployed standard
for exchange of metadata.  We expect that the naturally more expressive
digital object focus of OAI-ORE will complement the  narrower metadata
focus of OAI-PMH.  OAI-ORE will benefit from the interoperability
experience and depth of the international OAI community.

For more information contact ore@openarchives.org. The ORE web site is
at http://www.openarchives.org/ore/.