Beyond Theory: Preparing Dublin Core Metadata for OAI-PMH Harvesting

Abstract

This article will focus on how two different metadata harvesters—OAIster and the Online Computer Library Center's (OCLC) WorldCat—transform and present Dublin Core metadata extracted from CONTENTdm. It offers an examination, in plain language, of what two service providers do to metadata once they are harvested, and, in a case study, shows examples of how specific records display in both the local and aggregated interfaces. By helping metadata creators understand what happens to their metadata as it is harvested and transformed, this article aims to assist them in designing their metadata to be intelligible and useful to end-users across platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• metadata harvesting
• OAI-PMH
• CONTENTdm
• WorldCat
• digital images
• Dublin Core
• metadata aggregators
• OAIster
• MARC

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the following individuals for their insight and assistance in gathering information for this article: Tony Chirakos, Database Specialist at OCLC; Taylor Surface, Global Product Manager, Digital Collection Services at OCLC; and Kat Hagedorn, OAIster/Metadata Harvesting Librarian at the University of Michigan.

Notes

1. WorldCat has three distinct manifestations that are discussed in this article: “WorldCat,” the union catalog of library materials (including digital resources); “WorldCat.org,” the free, public Web site for discovering library materials in WorldCat; and the “WorldCat Metadata Harvesting Program” (WorldCat MHP), the programmatic effort of OCLC to encourage registration of digital content metadata into WorldCat. WorldCat MHP is also used to describe the process used to harvest, map, convert, and load metadata into WorldCat.

2. See http://www.openarchives.org for more information about the OAI.

3. Version 2.0 of the OAI-PMH: http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html

4. CDP Working Group's Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices: http://bcr.org/cdp/best/dublin-core-bp.pdf

5. Using Dublin Core: http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/

6. UALC's Metadata Guidelines for the Mountain West Digital Library: http://mwdl.org/public/mwdl/metadata_MWDL2006.pdf

7. Metadata guidelines for collections using CONTENTdm. http://www.lib.washington.edu/Msd/mig/advice/

8. NC ECHO Dublin Core Implementation Guidelines: http://www.ncecho.org/documents/ncdc2007.pdf

9. Metadata for You and Me workshop (online availability expected March 2009): http://images.library.uiuc.edu/projects/mym/

10. “Best Practices for Shareable Metadata (wiki)”: http://webservices.itcs.umich.edu/mediawiki/oaibp/?PublicTOC

11. Note that the metadata transformation discussed in this article specifically discusses Dublin Core metadata harvested from the CONTENTdm environment. While most of the information will apply to any Dublin Core metadata harvested via OAI-PMH, some of the discussion, for example, that of underlying field mappings, will apply only to the CONTENTdm platform.

12. Reifschneider data dictionary: http://contentdm.library.unr.edu/digitalprojects/reifschneider_data_dict.html

13. Arborglyphs on Peavine: http://tinyurl.com/2bjz5y