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’.
N.B. In order to retrieve datasets in bulk through harvesting it is recommended to set up your own system such that retrieval of datasets can be processed in an automated fashion.

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