What is the advantage of using OAI identifiers for metadata records?
Every metadata record harvested by the OAI-PMH has an identifier that corresponds to the item from which the metadata was derived. The only restriction for conformance is that this identifier should be a URI that is unique within the respective repository. Data providers may choose, however, to adopt an identifier scheme whereby their identifiers are globally unique within the oai naming scheme. This choice is made at the time of registration and instructions for making this choice are available at the registration page at http://www.openarchives.org/data/registerasprovider.html. The specification of the oai identifier format is available in the implementations guidelines document. The advantage for repositories of adopting this naming convention is that record identifiers will be resolvable via future oai name resolution services.
