ruby-oai

ruby-oai is a Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) library for Ruby. OAI-PMH is a somewhat archaic protocol for sharing metadata between digital library repositories. If you are looking to share metadata on the web you are probably better off using a feed format like RSS or Atom. If have to work with a backwards digital repository that only offers OAI-PMH access then ruby-oai is your friend.

The OAI-PMH spec defines six verbs (Identify, ListIdentifiers, ListRecords, GetRecords, ListSets, ListMetadataFormat) used for discovery and sharing of metadata.

The ruby-oai gem includes a client library, a server/provider library and a interactive harvesting shell.

Client

The OAI client library is used for harvesting metadata from repositories. For example to initiate a ListRecords request to pubmed you can:

  require 'oai'
  client = OAI::Client.new 'http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/oai/oai.cgi', :headers => { "From" => "oai@example.com" }
  response = client.list_records
  # Get the first page of records
  response.each do |record|
    puts record.metadata
  end
  # Get the second page of records
  response = client.list_records(:resumption_token => response.resumption_token)
  response.each do |record|
    puts record.metadata
  end
  # Get all pages together (may take a *very* long time to complete)
  client.list_records.full.each do |record|
    puts record.metadata
  end

See {OAI::Client} for more details

Server

The OAI provider library handles serving local content to other clients. Here's how to set up a simple provider:

  class MyProvider < Oai::Provider
    repository_name 'My little OAI provider'
    repository_url  'http://localhost/provider'
    record_prefix 'oai:localhost'
    admin_email 'root@localhost'   # String or Array
    source_model MyModel.new       # Subclass of OAI::Provider::Model
  end

See comment docs at top of OAI::Provider for more details, including discussion of the OAI::Provider::ActiveRecordWrapper class for quich setup of an OAI provider for an ActiveRecord model class (single database table)

Interactive Harvester

The OAI-PMH client shell allows OAI Harvesting to be configured in an interactive manner. Typing oai on the command line starts the shell. After initial configuration, the shell can be used to manage harvesting operations.

See {OAI::Harvester::Shell} for more details

Installation

Normally the best way to install oai is as part of your Gemfile:

source :rubygems
gem 'oai'

Alternately it can be installed globally using RubyGems:

$ gem install oai

Running tests

Tests are with Test::Unit, in a somewhat archaic/legacy style. Test setup especially is not how we would do things today. Run all tests with:

$ bundle exec rake test

There are also convenience tasks to run subsets of tests.

We use appraisal to test ActiveRecord-related functionality under multiple versions of ActiveRecord. While the above commands will test with latest ActiveRecord (allowed in our .gemspec development dependency), you can test under a particular version defined in the Appraisals file like so:

$ bundle exec appraisal rails-52 rake test
$ bundle exec appraisal rails-60 rake test

If you run into trouble with appraisal's gemfiles getting out of date and bundler complaining, try:

$ bundle exec appraisal clean $ appraisal generate

That may make changes to appraisal gemfiles that you should commit to repo.

License