Abstract:
When currently some Ethiopian Higher Educations are implementing digital libraries for their actual
clients and interoperability is one of the advancement features of digital libraries, extending this service
is this study purpose. Therefore this study identifies Ethiopian Higher Education Digital Libraries tools
they used; service they provide as well as identifies stakeholders, developers and end users so that
discussing three interoperability approaches used by digital libraries. Because of simplicity and suited
for current EHIDLs over other protocols OAI-PMH metadata harvesting approach is deployed to
EHIDL. Thus first we proposed EHIDL-AP metadata schema; then for DSpace and Greenstone digital
library tools demonstration about how to use EHIDL-AP schema and implement data provider also
presented; those metadata created by those institutions service provider using PKP OHS tools will
harvest, normalize and make available for EHIDL users. Service provider (federated system) of EHIDL
architecture, installation overview, adding EHIDL-AP schema, adding data providers, harvesting
metadata, searching and browsing functions also discussed. Finally the study conclusions presented
with a long side of recommendations for future works to be done to maximize the semantic level of
interoperability among EHIDLs.
