After attending a Core.ac.uk presentation last week I decided to check up on the health of the OAI2 in the repository and data catalogue.

I'm getting a strange failure on the step 2 of the https://www.openarchives.org/Register/ValidateSite process for the repository.

I'm getting an earliestDateStamp in the Identify response (https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/cgi/oai2?verb=Identify) that doesn't make sense. It gives me a date of 2022-12-17T01:18:01Z. Looking in the database I can see the earliest datestamp value is in 2008. The validator fails with this because searching for items from before this date returns results when it is expected that it will return a "noRecordsMatch error code".

I've had a look in cgi/oai2, specifically at the sub Identify to see how the earliestdateStamp is determined. Presumably the search performed here is returning an incorrect result. I've compared with the version of this file on the eprints github  and can't spot any differences in this section. I could hard code the date, but it's possible/likely this will change if the earliest record is edited. I would like to do it properly if possible and chase down the actual cause.

Can anybody shed any light on this?

Thanks,

James