Harvesting Metadata with MarcEdit Harvester

Last week, I got a chance to harvest some Dublin Core records from DSpace, which is our institutional repository. When the process have gone for 15 seconds, MarcEdit Harvester stopped. I wonder whether DSpace OAI-PMH setup is compilable with MarcEdit Harvester. As far as I know, except Oregon State University Library, I haven't heard that any institutions have successfully harvested metadata with MarcEdit.

It might need more customizations to comply with local needs. I hope I could hear more from other institutions which directly use MarcEdit to harvest metadata. Some commercial XML harvester software now are available. The function of editable configuration file makes the software very promising.

Interoperability and Metadata Quality

The interoperability between metadata schemas and institutional repositories is always a big concern since people want to exchange metadata between repositories. Metadata creation is expensive, in order to reuse metadata, institutional repositories start to harvest metadata from other repositories, this not only dramatically reduces the cost, but also facilitates to share knowledge globally.

However, interoperability is never easy to get, even though people have made efforts on it. I would suggest to control metadata quality. If metadata quality is guaranteed, it might take less time for our IT staff to clear up data and smoothly harvest metadata. Although there is no national standards like AACR2 to control metadata creation, metadata creators could use more controlled vocabularies by consulting FAST and database thesauri, and give enough descriptive metadata for users to search.

Controlling metadata quality offers accurate information for users to search and define the information they need. While for information professionals, this will warrant less potential errors and discrepancy, which would be a huge obstacle when we try to reuse the metadata.

Harvesting Non-Marc Records with MarcEdit

I am still waiting for the information from NITLE. Recently, MarcEdit has updated some new functions, such as macro engine, which could be used to further improve compliance of Marc records customized for local purpose. As long as I get the message from them, I will post how we do the process.

But in the meantime, I would like to pray for victims in China Earthquake, especially those children and teenage directly affected.

Harvesting Non-MARC Records From Institutional Repository

This week, I spend more time on OAI-PMH. I try to figure out what is the best way to harvest the records which we have deposited on DSpace. It seems that some libraries have tried to use software XML Harvester to harvest non-MARC records. This commercial software mostly has been integrated into ILS, and facilitates to harvest and convert Non-MARC records to MARC records.

Free software MarcEdit can also harvest NON-MARC records, but at some point, it has some problems. I am still exploring to make it work at my library. Hopefully, I can post the process later.

Scholarly Publishing vs. Scholarly Communication

Since all kinds of open-source software are available to the public, open access to scholarly publications becomes a hot topic in educational institutions. Sometime, people consider them same, or even equal. I would reserve this view rather than argue with it. For me, I think they are different things, but they might be related each other at some point.

The reason that people argue it is that open access is challenging traditional scholarly publishing, e.g. university press. I would say publications published by university press usually come from both internal and external institutions. They do not only rely on campus publications, otherwise, they won’t survive.

Today, open access makes scholarly online communication possible at free of charge, it will tremendously change the way that scholars communicate historically. Scholars have more options to make their researches shared by the community globally if they hold the copyrights. They can easily reach people who have the same interests at no cost. This scholarly communication will bring innovation to the scholarly community. On the other side, we also need to establish a fair system to control the quality of scholarly publishing and make those peer-reviewed publications available to more researchers at no cost.