OAI, which stands for Open Archives Initiative , was born of a need to enhance access to and recovery of ePrints, academic materials published electronically, but it is now also used to enhance access to digital resources and bibliographical material relating to culture, science and digital learning. The standard is applied extensively, supported by a very simple message exchange protocol and record coding according to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, ISO 15836 that enables this type of bibliographic information to be harvested in a very simple, flexible way.

The address of the OAI repository of Hispana is http://hispana.mcu.es/i18n/oai/oai.cmd