Date & Time

  • March 14th 15:00 UTC/GMT - 11:00 EDT

This call is a Community Forum call: Sharing best practices and challenges in the use of existing DSpace features

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Agenda


Community Forum Call: How are different institutions using crosswalks in DSpace?

Sharing best practices, challenges, and questions. The call will be dedicated to answering participants questions and discussing crosswalks.


Preparing for the call

Bring your questions/comments you would like to discuss to the call, or add them to the comments of this meeting page.

If you can join the call, or are willing to comment on the topics submitted via the meeting page, please add your name, institution, and repository URL to the Call Attendees section below.

Meeting notes

DSpace crosswalks

DSpace contains a number of crosswalk plugins to convert metadata from one metadata schema into another. Some of these are used by several of DSpace's internal features, such as the Packager plugins and OAH-PMH server. It is possible to add custom crosswalks to DSpace in the form of these crosswalk plugins.

OAI Crosswalks

The OAI harvesting functionality exposes DSpace metadata to external sources. By default this metadata is provided in the Dublin Core Metadata schema. It is possible for users to configure the OAI service to make use of any of the crosswalk plugins to provide a fit with the metadata schemas used by the service which is harvesting DSpace.

Packager Plugins

Packager plugins are a second category of modules which can call upon crosswalk plugins to convert metadata from the metadata schema used in DSpace to the desired package format to export the metadata to. In the other direction, crosswalks can also be used by these packager plugins' package ingesters to translate package contents back to the DSpace metadata structure. During the call it appeared none of the attendees were making customizations to crosswalks used by package disseminators. There was one institution which used custom crosswalks for ingesting metadata in DSpace.

External integrations

Some external integrations with Dspace also require crosswalks to translate metadata from one schema to another. One example of such platform is the Elements platform by Symplectic, which can be integrated with DSpace through the Repository Tools Package. During the meeting there was noticed Symplectic adds many crosswalks to DSpace.

Internal vs. external crosswalks

Crosswalks can also exist outside of the DSpace crosswalk plugins. In this kind of scenario metadata is exported out of DSpace, for example in a CSV format, and later externally manipulated. One technology which was used for this by an attendee was the marc4j java library. After manipulation the metadata can then be reimported, or transmitted to the desired recipient.

Call Attendees

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7 Comments

  1. Pauline Ward

    Thanks folks. When you say "crosswalks" do you mean such as mentioned in the manual in relation to OAI-PMH or Google Scholar metadata or is it to do with importing and exporting content via packages?

  2. Anne Lawrence

    +1 for clarification. We also use the crosswalk for Symplectic Repository Tools.

  3. Maureen Walsh

    We are not limiting "crosswalks". The discussion is open to how you are using crosswalks in any context.

  4. Susan Borda

    I made this sunburst visualization from metadata harvested via OAI-PMH then pulling the bits I needed with a Python script: http://scholarworks.montana.edu/ 

    You'll need to scroll down to see it.

    https://github.com/mutanthumb/ETD_sunburst

  5. Pauline Ward

    Was the meeting at 3pm?! It's always been at 4pm as long as I can remember.

    1. Ignace Deroost

      Hi Pauline, 

      We always try to keep the eastern (daylight saving) time at 11am. Usually that corresponds to 4pm GMT, but due to some coincidences in timezone changes this year our March meeting was at 3pm.

  6. Mariya Maistrovskaya

    Following up on the idea that surfaced in yesterday's call to maintain a list of customizations/integrations in different institutions' repositories that would allow community members to seek advice and ideas from peers. I've realized that the Duraspace registry does have an option to declare customizations and even filter by them - http://duraspace.org/registry/dspace/

    Because we often end up talking about customizations in DCAT calls, this may be a fitting opportunity remind call participants to update (or create) their repository's record in the registry. I can see that ours is out of date, so I'm going to get to it shortly!

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