Open Archives Initiative -Protocol for Metadata Harvesting 

If you  are interested in metadata sharing, publishing and archiving, then OAI-PMH is for you.  It is a standard way for other institutions to find, gather and share the materials in your ResCarta Web site.

COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple, ad hoc community specification for publishing OpenURL references in HTML.  Or more simply  a convention to embed bibliographic metadata in a line of HTML code.

ResCarta supports both of these metadata distribution systems