DigitalKoans

The Repositories Support Project has released two briefing papers: Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and Workflows (i.e., digital repository submission workflows). Both briefing papers provide succinct introductions to the topic at hand.

Ten vendors and application developers have agreed to support standard ILS interfaces that will permit integration and interoperability with emerging discovery services. These interfaces will be developed by the Digital Library Federation's ILS-Discovery Interface Committee. The participants are AquaBrowser, BiblioCommons, California Digital Library, Ex Libris, LibLime, OCLC, Polaris Library Systems, SirsiDynix, Talis, and VTLS.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

On March 6, representatives of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), academic libraries, and major library application vendors met in Berkeley, California to discuss a draft recommendation from the DLF for standard interfaces for integrating the data and services of the Integrated Library System (ILS) with new applications supporting user discovery. Such standard interfaces will allow libraries to deploy new discovery services to meet ever-growing user expectations in the Web 2.0 era, take full advantage of advanced ILS data management and services, and encourage a strong, innovative community and marketplace in next-generation library management and discovery applications.

At the meeting, participants agreed to support a set of essential functions through open protocols and technologies by deploying specific recommended standards.

These functions are:

1. Harvesting. Functions to harvest data records for library collections, both in full, and incrementally based on recent changes. Harvesting options could include either the core bibliographic records, or those records combined with supplementary information (such as holdings or summary circulation data). Both full and differential harvesting options are expected to be supported through an OAI-PMH interface.
2. Availability. Real-time querying of the availability of a bibliographic (or circulating) item. This functionality will be implemented through a simple REST interface to be specified by the ILS-DI task group.
3. Linking. Linking in a stable manner to any item in an OPAC in a way that allows services to be invoked on it; for example, by a stable link to a page displaying the item's catalog record and providing links for requests for that item. This functionality will be implemented through a URL template defined for the OPAC as specified by the ILS-DI task group.

The open source OAI4J software from the National Library of Sweden "can be used to harvest metadata from OAI-PMH compliant repositories. It can also be used to create new OAI-ORE Resource Maps from scratch, to parse existing ones and to serialize them to xml." You can download the client, which is written in Java, from SourceForge.

Terry Reese has posted step-by-step instructions about how to harvest OAI-PMH records from the University of Michigan Libraries' MBooks digital books collection using her MarcEdit freeware program. The data can either be converted to the MARC format or stored as is. MarcEdit also has a Z39.50 client as well as crosswalks, such as MARC to Dublin Core and MARC to EAD.

The Greenstone Digital Library project has released an alpha version of an OAI-PHM metadata analysis tool that can be used to "generate statistics and visualisations of OAI repositories." Several sample reports are available, including one for the University of Illinois IDEAL repository.

The JISC-funded extension of the STARGATE project has released the STARGATE Extension Final Report.

Here's an excerpt from the original STARGATE project page that explains its goals:

The Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) at of Strathclyde set out to implement a low-tech solution to OAI-based disclosure for small publishers. Their STARGATE project was based on the 'static repositories' model for using OAI-PMH . . . Instead of building an OAI-compliant repository, a publisher builds a static repository, effectively an XML file of the relevant metadata on an accessible server. A separate static repository gateway handles the technical aspects of making the metadata available for harvesting, i.e. the complexity is shifted away from the publisher.

Here's an excerpt from the report's "Executive Summary":

The extension has produced a functional branded gateway that the publishing community can use to explore the use of static repositories. It will be maintained for the next year. The gateway is available at http://stargate.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/gateway/.

The project concludes that although functional the software is not suitable for deployment by a novice user. It is also effectively still in at the beta stage of development and it has only been used in a limited number of settings.

The project further suggests that the creation and maintenance of gateway(s) within the publishing community may be more suitably carried out in the same way that DOI and Purl provision is offered through a third-party service provider willing to work with developing open source software. Any deployment of a gateway by JISC to support wider participation in static repositories should also engage with the gateway software developers.

The University of Michigan Libraries have made over 100,000 metadata records from its MBooks collection available for OAI-PMH harvesting. The records are for digitized books in the public domain.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify

Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed. We have split these into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide. There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting. We anticipate having 1 million records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by Google.

The University of Michigan Libraries have released the UMich OAI Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl. . . .

UMHarvester is a robust tool using LWP for harvesting nigh on every OAI data provider available. It allows for incremental harvesting, has multiple re-try options, and a batch harvest tool (Batch_UMHarvest) that can automatically perform incremental harvesting.

UMProvider relies heavily on libxml (XML::LibXML) and will store the data in nearly any relational database. It functions by harvesting from a database of records, making rights determinations from a separate database, and providing the resulting set of records.

Originally, only the UMHarvester was available from UM's DLXS software site. The UMProvider tool is newly developed and takes the place of our DLXS data provider tool.