The latest Ariadne has a pretty brief howto article [1] about using Net::OAI::Harvester [2] to query OAI-PMH archives [3]. If you haven't heard of OAI-PMH the short story is that it's an HTTP/XML based protocol for sharing metadata. Net::OAI::Harvester is an object oriented client module for querying and retrieving records from OAI-PMH repositories.
Apart from the fun in querying repositories like arxiv.org and memory.loc.gov for their metadata, I got to learn more about parsing XML with XML::SAX and SAX filters (very cool stuff), and seriliazing Perl objects on disk with Storable. The idea is that Net::OAI::Harvester could be used in other Perl applications that need an OAI-PMH interface. //Ed [1] http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/summers/ [2] http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Net::OAI::Harvester [3] http://www.openarchives.org
