Participation and OAI Requirements 

 

How will it work?

 

The Digital Commonwealth (DigiComm) brings together the metadata, or descriptions for the digital resources held at each member institution into a central database. The DigiComm gathers, or harvests metadata from participating institutions using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). All the metadata gathered from each contributing institution is stored in a centralized database. The DigiComm builds and maintains an interface to this database of aggregated metadata. The process gathers only the descriptions of the digital resources, not the digital resources/files themselves. For example, the information about a digitized photograph, such as title, date, and keywords, is harvested, but the image file itself is not.

 

How do I participate?

 

To have the metadata from your digital collections harvested by DigiComm, there are two requirements:

  1. Your institution must be a Digital Commonwealth member or belong to a group sponsoring member. Membership details.
  2. Your digital resource descriptions or metadata must conform to the OAI-PMH standard, be network accessible, and meet the minimum DigiComm metadata requirements.

How do I create high-quality, standards-based digital collections?

 

Creating a digital collection 

 

My institution is a Digital Commonwealth member. How do I contribute OAI-compliant metadata to the Digital Commonwealth portal?

 
  1. Shared Repository: Your institution participates in a shared repository for digital collections.
    • In this case, your institution contributes its digital collections to a shared repository that is a DigiComm member and can produce OAI-compliant metadata. The metadata in the repository is then harvested by DigiComm. Shared repositories are often run and hosted by a consortium. Your options for participation in a shared repository will vary depending upon your institution’s consortial memberships. Click here for a list of known repositories in Massachusetts.
  2. Harvested Site: Your institution hosts its own digital collections and uses digital content management software that is capable of producing and making available OAI-compliant metadata.
    • In this case, your metadata can be automatically harvested by the DC. Software known to produce harvestable, OAI-compliant metadata:
      • CONTENTdm
      • Digital Commons
      • DigiTool
      • DSpace
      • Fedora
      For more tools, refer to the Digital Library Federation's document on OAI Tools.
  3. Your institution hosts its own digital collection and uses digital content management software or some other system that is NOT capable of producing and making available OAI-compliant metadata automatically. These other systems may require that metadata be manipulated in order to comply with OAI standards.
    • In this case, your existing metadata and digital content management system must be assessed to determine the steps needed to make the data OAI-compliant and harvestable. As a DigiComm member, or as a member of a consortium your institution may be entitled to assistance with this process.
    • Crosswalking
  4. Your institution owns digital assets, but they are not contained within a repository. [Upcoming link to information for contributing assets to the DigiComm repository.]

OAI-PMH Metadata Requirements

 

Metadata must
  1. Conform to the simple Dublin Core standard at the minimum, (see Preferred Metadata Standard).
  2. Be encoded in XML.
  3. Reside in a network accessible repository that is able to process OAI-PMH requests correctly.


Digital Commonwealth Metadata Requirements

 

OAI Implementation for Repositories 

Repositories are defined as "data providers".

 

Open Archives documentation 

Implementation Guidelines for Repository Implementers
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-repository.htm
 

Implementing OAI-PMH, Part 4 of the OAI Forum's online tutorial, OAI for Beginners

http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/english/page4.htm

 

Best Practices for OAI Data Provider Implementations and Shareable Metadata 

http://oai-best.comm.nsdl.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?PublicTOC