By the FRELIP Editorial Team
Search a single FRELIP query and you may pull records from dozens of repositories at once. The quiet machinery behind that is OAI-PMH — the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. This briefing demystifies how harvesting works: how repositories expose their records as structured Dublin Core metadata, how an aggregator periodically requests new or updated records, and how those records are normalized and indexed for discovery. We will walk through the request-and-response cycle in plain language, explain why metadata quality at the source determines discoverability downstream, and show how this standard lets a thesis deposited at one university surface in a continent-wide search — turning isolated collections into a connected scholarly commons.