About Harvesting

Datasets that have an open data license are being made available through this website. You'll be able to browse and search for datasets and then download them by a click on the ‘Download’-button, retrieving individual datasets, one at a time. There is also another method to retrieving datasets. Instead of using this site, downloading datasets can be done by sending a certain command to a server using the OAI-PMH protocol. This enables you to automate the retrieval of datasets in bulk. This process is called ‘harvesting’.

Harvesting using OAI-PMH

In order to standardise the process of harvesting, a protocol has been developed: Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)
This protocol describes a set of requirements that a dataset provider must meet, thereby ensuring the standardisation of the retrieval process. More info about this protocol and the available commands can be found on https://www.openarchives.org/pmh. The process of harvesting datasets available on archieven.nl adheres to this protocol.

The base address that is used to send OAI-PMH commands to is: https://harvest.archieven.nl/OAI/OAIHandler