OAI_PMH(1)

💖 OAI_PMH(1) 💖

okay so bestie, gather round, because today we're talking about oai_pmh.pl, aka the little Perl script that pipes OAI-PMH straight to your command line like it's nothing. no cap. she's giving "User Contributed Perl Documentation" energy and honestly? iconic.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

oai_pmh.pl — pipe OAI-PMH to the command-line 🫶

that's it. that's the whole elevator pitch. short, sweet, slays.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

oai_pmh.pl <options> [baseURL]

yes, baseURL is optional in the brackets sense, and <options> is where all the fun lives. let's get into it 💅

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• --help
• --man
• --verbose — be more verbose. and because it's repeatable, you can just keep saying it over and over like you're hyping yourself up in the mirror 💅 more repeats, more verbosity.
• --force — force a non-conformant OAI request. bestie. this is the "I know what I'm doing" button. it does not make it conformant, it just forces it through. respect the chaos 🙈
• --from <ISO datetime>
• --identifier <identifier> — the OAI identifier you wanna use for GetRecord or ListMetadataFormats.
• --metadataPrefix <mdp> — specify the format of the metadata you wanna retrieve.
• -X, --request <command> — the verb you're requesting. defaults to ListRecords.
• --set <oai set> — request only those records that live in a set.
• --until <ISO datetime>

not me noticing that --from and --until got no description in the source — that's not me being lazy, that's just canon, i'm not about to make stuff up about them 🙈

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🔥 DESCRIPTION 🔥

so the whole point: retrieve data from OAI-PMH endpoints 🌈

and the output format? lowkey specific, so listen up:

<headers>

<content>
<FORMFEED>

where <headers> are in HTTP header format. the content will be the raw XML as exposed by the repository — no glow-up, no reformatting, straight off the shelf, periodt. and every single record is separated by a FORMFEED character. every one. no skipping. 🦋

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🍓 example time 🍓

for example:

oai_pmh.pl -X GetRecord --metadataPrefix oai_dc \
        --identifier oai:eprints.soton.ac.uk:20 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/cgi/oai2

look at her go. -X GetRecord for the verb, --metadataPrefix oai_dc for the format, --identifier oai:eprints.soton.ac.uk:20 for the record, and the baseURL riding along at the end. main character energy fr fr 👑

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⭐ reminder bestie: the content you get back is the raw XML as exposed by the repository, and records are separated by FORMFEED characters. that's the deal. iykyk.

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and that's the whole page, my love 💜 this little gem comes to you as User Contributed Perl Documentation from perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25 — so go forth, harvest that metadata, and stay iconic ✨🎀