Test the records behind the OAI-PMH endpoint.
Editors do not need to write the protocol, but they should know whether the endpoint exposes complete, stable and current article metadata.
Seven checks for a healthy source
1. Availability
The public endpoint responds reliably and is not blocked by a firewall, maintenance mode or authentication rule.
2. Repository identity
The Identify response describes the repository and administrative contact accurately.
3. Formats and sets
Supported formats are listed, and sets or date ranges behave as expected.
4. Record completeness
Sample titles, creators, abstracts, dates, identifiers, language, rights and source URLs.
5. Stable identifiers
OAI identifiers and article URLs remain persistent across platform changes.
6. Updates
Corrections produce appropriate datestamps, allowing incremental harvests to detect them.
7. Deletions and status
The repository has a documented approach to deleted, withdrawn, corrected and retracted records.
8. Monitoring
An assigned person tests samples after upgrades, migrations and metadata-template changes.
Frequent failures
- All author names stored as one string
- Empty description or rights fields
- HTML fragments and broken character encoding
- Duplicate records after migration
- Dates that disagree with the article page
- Temporary URLs or long redirect chains
- Endpoint disabled after a plugin or security update
Correct the source workflow rather than repeatedly repairing individual harvested records. Test a recent article, an older article, a correction and a record with multiple authors.