The Open Archives Initiative provides a convention for interoperability among archives.
Archives provide access to records .
The word document is purposely avoided and the notion of a record is purposely imprecise. This document describes the elements of the Open Archives Metadata Set. The semantics of this set has purposely been kept simple in the interest of easy creation and widest applicability. The expectation is that individual archives will maintain metadata with more expressive semantics and the Open Archives Dienst Subset provides the mechanism for retrieval of this more expressive metadata. A DTD is given at the end of this document.