The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability solutions that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The roots of the OAI lie in the E-Print community. Over the last year its focus has been extended to include all content providers. This paper describes the recent history of the OAI -- its origins in promoting E-Prints, the broadening of its focus, the details of its technical standard for metadata harvesting, the applications of this...