Existing archives of OAI-PMH provider data

[Daniel Radetsky]

Folks:

I came across this group as part of my quest to get my hands on some library metadata from a few libraries. As I understand it, OAI-PMH is a protocol for libraries to expose their metadata to be harvested and/or for harvesters to consume this metadata. In other words, despite hosting this list of institutions which expose metadata:

https://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites

OAI itself does not actually download and store all this data itself. That's somebody else's job. Which is fine, but what I was really hoping for was there was one or more archiving sites which themselves regularly consumed all the data from all those listed sites which expose their metadata via OAI-PMH and then provided that metadata for download in zipfiles or tarballs or some such. Does anything like this exist? Can anyone point me to it?

I ask because a) I don't want to have to figure out how to consume OAI-PMH feeds myself if I can help it, and b) a lot of the listed sites seem to be broken. Maybe the local IT staff aren't keeping their OAI server running or something. But if one or more somebodies had been downloading those feeds regularly, I could still access their archives and that would probably give me what I want. For example, I checked out

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/dspace-oai/request?verb=Identify

And it appears to work fine, and I'm guessing that if I spent some time messing with existing software libs for OAI-PMH (which I hope exist) I'd be able to get all the data I wanted from there. By contrast, the URL for UC's library:

http://servlet1.lib.berkeley.edu:8080/oai/provider?verb=Identify

is broken. Finding the responsible person and having them fix it somehow seems impractical, but downloading a slightly out-of-date archive would probably be fine.

So is there some place that has all this stuff archived?

Thanks,

--dmr