Page 195 - Building Digital Libraries

CHAPTER 7

Metadata Repurposing

Digital repositories supporting OAI-PMH also offer an organization a num-
ber of opportunities to repurpose metadata between various systems. Within
the library community, many organizations still create MARC records for
items housed within their digital repository for indexing with the organiza-
tion’s ILS (integrated library system). This often means that organizations
are creating multiple copies of a metadata record—an original record cre-
ated in MARC and a record created within the digital repository. However,
by utilizing their OAI-PMH server, organizations can reduce the need for
duplicate metadata creation by simply deriving all metadata surrogates from
the metadata stored within the digital repository.

The Oregon State University Electronic Theses Process
Like many organizations, the Oregon State University Libraries (ORST)
requires graduate students to submit their thesis into the libraries’ institu-
tional repository (IR). The IR is where the primary metadata record for an
individual thesis is created; however, a MARC metadata record still must
be created for indexing into OCLC’s WorldCat database and the local ILS.
Previously, library technical services staff would simply re-create the MARC
records by hand utilizing the metadata from the IR as a template. And while
this process took only a handful of minutes to complete, when multiplied
over the course of 50–100 documents, it was found that a significant number
of resources were being used to re-create these metadata records.
In order to streamline the process of generating MARC metadata, a
process was developed that allowed technical services staff to utilize the
OAI-PMH server to output an item’s metadata and automatically generate
the necessary MARC records. Moreover, given the ability to harvest sets of
records in one-month increments, the harvesting process would only need
to be done at the end of each month, or twelve times a year.
To develop the process, ORST developed a custom XSLT crosswalk that
is specific to the electronic theses collection and MarcEdit’s built-in OAI-
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PMH harvester. Utilizing MarcEdit, library staff simply initialize the built-in
OAI-PMH harvester and provide the necessary harvesting information.
Using the MarcEdit OAI-PMH harvester, technical services staff are
able to set the harvesting range and the desired character set of the MARC
records. In figure 7.5, one can see that MarcEdit’s OAI-PMH harvester
enables the user to harvest from multiple known metadata types, as well as
convert XML data encoded in the UTF-8 character set into the more tra-
ditional MARC-8 character set. With the options set, staff simply run the
harvester, which returns a file of generated MARC records.

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