The case for metadata harvesting

Metadata harvesting is an increasingly popular model of interaction between the mutually autonomous parties of medium, medium‐large federations of digital library services. With a harvesting protocol, in particular, resource descriptions locally available at each party can be served to remote applications for the implementation of federated services, such as resource discovery. This article offers a systematic explanation of the success of the model and its standard implementations in the context of current initiatives for national and international federations.