Harvesting and aggregation of digital libraries using the oai framework

Digital Libraries (DLs) are an important tool for quality information retrieval over the Internet. However, with the information explosion on the Internet and the increase in the number of DLs, users might need to search several DLs before finding the relevant information looked for. Federated DLs (FDLs) and Harvested DLs (HDLs) can solve this problem. To overcome the lack of uniformity and interoperability problems between DLs and to develop standards that can ease the distribution of information between them, an initiative called OAI established the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol. While this protocol enables the construction of FDLs, HDLs are hardly found. This paper presents the RIDDLE model for construction and aggregation of HDLs using the OAI-PMH protocol with some modifications. The use of RIDDLE can provide for high quality information retrieval from digital libraries on the Internet.