Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

The protocol is usually just referred to as the OAI Protocol.

OAI-PMH uses XML over HTTP. Version 2.0 of the protocol was released in 2002; the document was last updated in 2015. It has a Creative Commons license BY-SA.