A Multi-Infrastructure OAI-PMH Endpoint for Research Infrastructure Orchestration in the H2IOSC Project

This paper presents the design and implementation of a multi-infrastructure OAI-PMH 2.0 endpoint developed within the H2IOSC project, an Italian initiative aimed at strengthening the digital infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The system enables multiple European research infrastructures – including OPERAS, E-RIHS, and CLARIN – to expose their resource metadata through a unified harvesting interface, supporting both Dublin Core and a custom native metadata format. We describe the complete system architecture, which comprises a web-based data entry application, a secured backend API, a Git-based data repository, and a fully compliant OAI-PMH server. A distinctive contribution of this work is the detailed description of the data lifecycle: how a single metadata field travels from the user interface, through the JSON data layer, to its final representation in the OAI-PMH XML response. The system has been validated against the official OpenArchives OAI-PMH validator and is currently in production use. The architecture is designed for replicability and can be adopted by other projects requiring multi-tenant metadata harvesting capabilities.