How to understand OAI timestamp and datestamp

Description

Our OAI publishing process is quite busy and takes a few moments to publish the required records. That's why we have a question about the timing of the publishing for the OAI interface. Which timestamp will the OAI interface deliver for a published title?

Resolution

OAI will deliver the last timestamp when publishing is processing the data. The cataloguing date or the last update date does not matter. For OAI clients it means that they can safely harvest past items.

The timestamp is present in the OAI record within the header section in the datestamp tag.

Example: 
http://your.server/OAI?verb=GetRecor...XX01-000041729 

Output: 

<record>
<header>
<identifier>oai:your.server:XXX01-000041729</identifier>
<datestamp>2017-05-10T09:18:13Z</datestamp>
...

​​​​This is UTC datestamp.

The given datestamp is equal to the moment when the OAI record has been written into z00p Oracle table, which can be additionally seen in the ue-21 log file (run_e_21.nnnnn), e.g.:

HANDLING DOC NO. - XXX01.000041729 2017-05-10 11:18:13

The datestamp is also stored in the Oracle table z00p, z00p_timestamp:

xxx50@ALEPH22> select z00p_set, Z00P_TIMESTAMP from z00p where Z00P_DOC_NUMBER='000041729';

Z00P_SET Z00P_TIMESTAMP
-------------------- ---------------
XXX-OAI-MARC21 201705100918132
 

• Article last edited: 16-May-2017