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- DSpace is often not correctly configured. This problem mostly occurs in African countries, India, China, Colombia and Ecuador. The problem lies in the incorrect configuration of the handle system, which causes OAI-PMH to be unable to harvest the repository. The exact configuration errors do vary. In some cases a default handle URL is shown, in other cases the end user UI and PMH interface show different links, or display the same erroneous link. Around 170 DSpace repositories suffer from this.
- Registered handle numbers are not correct or not working: It is not certain why this issue occurs. It might be caused by repository administrators who configure handles on their own, without registering with handle.net. Around 40 DSpace repositories have this problem.
- Someone tries to repair the situation: When Friedrich notices problems with a certain repository, he contacts the DSpace administrator. This often results in an attempt to repair the situation. In reality this sometimes results in a repository containing a mixture of old, still incorrect data and new, correct data. It is possible this is caused by incorrectly running the update script. Facilitating the correct use of this script through enhanced documentation could be a solution.
- The administrator is unreachable: Related to the previous problem, the repository administrator is often difficult to contact. In many cases the administrator email address is not configured. Often there is also no contact email address to be found in the end user UI. In case there is a contact form provided, submitting an entry to this frequently results into no response.
- The harvesting process crashes: This issue was found with newer versions of DSpace. During the OAI-PMH harvesting process an internal server error causes the harvesting problem to stop.
- OAI-PMH webapp is not deployed: Sometimes there is a working end-user interface, but no OAI-PMH webapp deployed.
- There are no UTF-8 characters in the responses but question marks: This is likely not a DSpace issue, but a Tomcat misconfiguration issue.
- Problem with the LYNCODE interface: This specific issue delivers a "No matches for the query" for ListRecords. It is possible this is caused by cronjobs which are not running (frequently).
Document that describes these issues in detail, including examples: http://bit.ly/BASE-SEARCH-OAI-issues-DSpace
OAI harvesting related questions from the community
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