The document summarizes the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including its history and key standards/protocols. Specifically, it discusses how OAI: 1) Develops and promotes interoperability standards to facilitate dissemination of scholarly content across repositories. 2) Arose from efforts to increase access to e-print archives and has expanded to generalize across all web-based information. 3) Defines the Open Archives Metadata Set and OAI Metadata Harvesting Protocol (OAI-PMH) to expose metadata for harvesting and enable new services.