---
id: sickle
version: "0.7.0"
license: BSD
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: abandoned
---

# Sickle — A lightweight OAI client library for Python

License: permissive · Maintenance: abandoned · Downloads: 165.7K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Sickle wraps the OAI-PMH protocol in a Pythonic interface, letting you query OAI-compliant digital repositories (typically institutional or subject-based archives) to retrieve structured metadata records. It handles the protocol's request-response cycle, pagination via resumption tokens, and automatic parsing of Dublin Core metadata into Python dictionaries, so you can focus on the data rather than XML parsing and HTTP state management.

The library is built on requests for HTTP communication and lxml for XML parsing. It supports all six OAI verbs (ListRecords, GetRecord, ListIdentifiers, ListSets, ListMetadataFormats, Identify), optional basic authentication, configurable retry logic, and filtering of deleted records. The last release was in May 2020, and the repository is no longer actively maintained.

Use it for:

- Harvest metadata from institutional repositories or digital libraries that expose OAI-PMH endpoints to build local search indexes or data pipelines.
- Bulk download Dublin Core records from academic archives for research data aggregation or analysis.
- Migrate metadata from one OAI-compliant repository to another by iterating through all records and transforming them.
- Monitor changes in a repository by periodically harvesting records and comparing against previous runs to detect new or deleted items.
- Build a metadata aggregator that combines records from multiple OAI sources into a unified catalog.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Sickle is a lightweight Python client library for harvesting metadata from OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) compliant repositories, handling all six OAI verbs and automatically deserializing Dublin Core metadata.

Yes, if you need to harvest from an OAI-PMH repository and can accept that the package is no longer maintained. The low install friction, permissive license, and stable API make it suitable for production use in stable environments. However, verify that your target repositories still use OAI-PMH and that you are comfortable with no future updates or support for newer Python versions.

## Install

pip install sickle
uv add sickle
poetry add sickle

## Installing Sickle

Before you install: Low install friction with only two runtime dependencies (requests and lxml). However, the package is in abandoned maintenance status with no releases since May 2020 and the last commit in July 2023, so expect no bug fixes or updates for new Python versions.

License in practice: BSD license is permissive, allowing commercial and private use with minimal restrictions, making it safe to adopt from a licensing perspective.

Quickstart:

pip install sickle

from sickle import Sickle
sickle = Sickle('http://elis.da.ulcc.ac.uk/cgi/oai2')
records = sickle.ListRecords(metadataPrefix='oai_dc')
first_record = records.next()

Verify before relying:

- Current compatibility with modern Python versions (classifiers list up to Python 3.5) and whether lxml's security posture remains acceptable for production use.
- Whether the OAI-PMH protocol itself remains actively used in the repositories you intend to harvest from.

## Package facts

- License: BSD (permissive)
- Python support: unspecified
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: abandoned
- Downloads: 165.7K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

oai-pmh client library, metadata harvesting python, open archives protocol, dublin core metadata extraction, oai repository harvesting, xml metadata parsing, institutional repository access, metadata-harvesting, oai-pmh, xml-parsing

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