Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A repository publishing a Change List of newly-added items every five minutes for downstream subscribers.
- Is an instance
A multi-tier preservation pipeline using ResourceSync to keep replicas in step.
Editorial commentary
ResourceSync is ANSI/NISO Z39.99, first published in 2014 as a joint NISO/Open Archives Initiative effort and revised as Z39.99-2017. It was designed as a ‘webby’ successor to OAI-PMH, built on the Sitemap protocol that web crawlers already use for discovery — extended with document types for a Resource List (full current inventory), a Change List (what changed since a given point), a Resource Dump (bulk transfer), and a Capability List (what a given server supports), plus push-notification extensions so a source server can proactively tell subscribers when something changes rather than waiting to be polled.
How this differs from OAI-PMH
OAI-PMH syncs metadata records only, over a bespoke protocol a server has to implement specifically to participate. ResourceSync syncs the resources themselves — full text, datasets, any web-addressable content — alongside their metadata, over plain HTTP using the same Sitemap mechanism already deployed for search-engine discovery, so in principle any standard web server can participate without a dedicated harvesting-protocol stack.
Where this shows up in research infrastructure
ResourceSync appears in repository-to-repository and preservation-network contexts: multi-tier replication setups that need to keep mirrored or backup copies of repository content in step, and content aggregators that need both the metadata record and the underlying resource, not metadata alone. It sits alongside OAI-ORE (which describes aggregations of resources) rather than replacing it.
Scope note: implementing a ResourceSync endpoint is a repository-platform/developer task; this entry orients a repository or CRIS manager to when the term appears — typically in a platform’s admin settings or an aggregator’s harvesting requirements — and how it differs from the more familiar OAI-PMH.
References
- ANSI/NISO Z39.99-2017, ResourceSync Framework Specification.
- Van de Sompel H., Klein M. et al., ‘The ResourceSync Framework’ (resourcesync.org).
Also known as
ANSI/NISO Z39.99
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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