Net::OAI::Harvester
-------------------

Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl library for interacting with OAI-PMH repositories.
OAI-PMH stands for Open Archives Intitiatve Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
More about OAI-PMH can be found at http://www.openarchives.org.

INSTALLATION

You *must* be connected to the Internet to run the test suite.

Either:

perl Build.PL
Build
Build test
Build install

Or:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install


DEPENDENCIES

OAI-PMH is essentially XML over HTTP so rather than reinvent the wheel there
are a few dependencies.

LWP::UserAgent - for HTTP 
XML::SAX - for XML parsing
URI - for url representation
Storable - for object serialization

You also probably should be using Perl 5.8.0 at least since many repositories 
contain UTF8 data.


TROUBLESHOOTING

The test suite recognizes the environment variable NOH_ParserPackage to
force usage of an specific parser:

NOH_ParserPackage=XML::SAX::PurePerl ./Build test

This is to work around cases where the file ParserDetails.ini of
XML::SAX::ParserFactory is not (yet) set up properly and the
expected automatic fallback to XML::SAX::PurePerl somehow fails.

--

It is crucial to have version 1.04 of XML::SAX::Base. This version
is installed along with the XML-SAX package which is contained in
the "vendor" tree of the perl libraries on many systems. On CPAN
there also exists a separate module XML::SAX::Base with version 1.02
only which is not sufficient and - if installed - typically resides
in the "site_perl" branch of the libraries, thus taking precedence
over the newer version. Please make sure to uninstall/remove version 
1.02 of XML::SAX::Base when you encounter it in your installation.



COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

This software is free software and may be distributed under the same
terms as Perl itself.

Copyright (C) 2003 Ed Summers <ehs@pobox.com>

