After Setting up a handle.net account for DSPACE I needed to start and look at making my DSPACE install OAI compliant. I was directed to Open Archives, after a bit of googling I ended up at the wiki page Use the OAI-PMH interface. It turns out that to enable the OAI-PMH interface all I had to do was just drop the dspace-oai.war file into the same webapps directory as my dspace.war deployment, restart my app server and bob's you're uncle.

To quote the dspace wiki page on OAI-PMH

• Identify . used to retrieve information about a repository: http://web-address-to-my-dspace/dspace-oai/request?verb=Identify
• ListMetadataFormats . lists metadata formats supported for OAI-PMH: http://web-address-to-my-dspace/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListMetadataFormats
• ListRecords . permits metadata harvesting of all or a selection of items: http://web-address-to-my-dspace/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
• ListSets . lists the .sets. (i.e. DSpace Collections) available in a repository: http://web-address-to-my-dspace/dspace-oai/request?verb=ListSets

Using the above knowledge I tested my OAI-PMH interface with a web browser. I was quite pleased at yet again how easy it was to get this functionality working. That's another two thumbs up to DSPACE and friends.