Abstract: Harvesting tasks gather information to a central repository. We studied the metadata returned from 744179 harvesting tasks from 2120 harvesting services in 529 harvesting rounds during a period of two years. To achieve that, we initiated nearly 1,500,000 tasks, because a significant part of the Open Archive Initiative harvesting services never worked or have ceased working while many other services fail occasionally. We studied the synthesis (elements and verbosity of values) of the harvested metadata, and how it evolved over time. We found tha...
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Topics: 
World Wide Web
Database
Information retrieval