University of York xforms

At the University of York we have a range of resource types identified for the Digital Library and from the outset knew that no single metadata application profile would suit all of our needs. The initial iteration of the Digital Library (YODL) uses Muradora and so we have built on the xforms metadata editors which ship with Muradora to create custom forms for editing metadata. These have been incorporated as part of a submission workflow. The overarching aim for the workflow, which includes the metadata editing forms, is for it to be extensible, configurable and modular. At present we have a workflow that will deal with any media type, but will perform specific actions on known content. For example, images are processed and have a VRA metadata xform. All other content types at present are described using Dublin Core, although this will change over the coming year.

Xforms

The following work has been done on xforms

• Customisations to in-built Muradora DC editor
• Xform for VRA metadata, including a transform to simple Dublin Core
• A licence information xform, which creates an in-house XML datastream and updates one element with the VRA XML metadata

Additional features

• 'add similar' ie. the facility to add a metadata record that is similar to the last one submitted by that users
• data dictionary management tool to allow for the curation of terms before they are added to the data dictionary; also to allow for deletion/update of terms within the data dictionary and within fedora object xml datastreams

Future work

• workflow for the submission of music resources, including a profile of MODS for music developed by the Digital Library team at York
• vocabulary management tool based on SKOS to plug into the current xforms as a web service
• performance enhancements to improve the speed of submission
• de-coupling of the xforms from Muradora