The Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has been widely adopted as an approach to allow harvesting of metadata from archives. Automated discovery of Providers is not part of the protocol. Service Providers have the additional burden of searching the web for new Data Providers. This leads to duplicate effort since every Service Provider maintains a private collection of Data Providers.This paper proposes a decentralized registry. It is open for external contributions by design and has no single point of failure. All participants together build up a single global collection of Data Providers. New Data Providers only have to register with a single member and the entry is distributed to all participating Service Providers. Building a single collection with distributed discovery allows Service Providers to refocus on the value added service and eases the spreading of data for Data Providers.
Samuel Goebert, Bettina Harriehausen-Mühlbauer, Steven Furnell, "Towards A Unified OAI-PMH Registry" in Proc. IS&T Archiving 2014, 2014, pp 97 - 100, https://doi.org/10.2352/issn.2168-3204.2014.11.1.art00021