OAI-publishers in repository infrastructures

OAI-Publishers are software modules implementing the OAI-PMH protocol interface, enabling harvesting of metadata records describing the digital resources of a Digital Repository. Typically, such modules are manually configured and implemented to export records contained into a local store according to the metadata formats supported by the relative Repository. Due to their static nature, these are not apt to the dynamic context of Repository Infrastructures, where a virtual store, made of a dynamic pool of distributed physical stores, may hosts records of unpredictable metadata formats. In this paper, we describe the internal architecture of the OAI-Publisher Service built for the DRIVER Repository Infrastructure. The Service is capable of self-configuring its internals so as to adapt to the variable content of the virtual store. Finally, we shall show how, the immersion into a rich "living" infrastructure enables its extension with extra functionalities, novel to traditional OAIPublishers technology.