Wednesday, September 24, 2014

DSpace: Harvesting an external collection using OAI-ORE

Would you like to create a collection in DSpace that is automatically capable of mirroring content from some other source? Well, if that external source support OAI, your in luck. First a quick primer: OAI has two modes, OAI-PMH (metadata only), and OAI-ORE (also get the bitstreams / content files). If you only need the metadata for metadata-records only, you'll be fine with OAI-PMH, if you also want to reference, or store the bitstreams into DSpace, then hopefully your data provider support OAI-ORE. DSpace by the way supports both OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE. So you can harvest a DSpace collection and get metadata and files.

First: Create a new Collection in DSpace.

Second: Edit Collection - Content Source - OAI Provider
In DSpace, go to Edit Collection, then click the tab for Content Source.
Then choose the option that "This collection harvests its content from an external source".
Once you save, you can then enter the OAI provider base url, then enter the set ID. Also there is an option to choose between "Harvest Metadata Only", or, if the data source supports ORE, you can either choose to have a reference to the files, or have DSpace download the files, and store them in DSpace.



Once you Save, then you get the option to "Import Now".

Import Now will import this right now. Reset and Reimport will delete the previously harvested contents, and reimport.

You can also see all of the collections that have OAI Harvesting enabled from your Control Panel:



Lastly, if you find yourself harvesting from a source that is going to regularly update their contents, and you want to regularly harvest their content, then setup a cron task to have DSpace Command Line harvest the collection each day.

peterdietz:dspace peterdietz$ /dspace/bin/dspace harvest --start
Starting harvest loop... running. 

Thursday, September 11, 2014

DSpace Additions: Author page and Altmetric statistics badge

It's a mixture of big things and little things that can add additional value to your DSpace site. Two interesting additions that I've recently stumbled upon are: Researcher Pages, and Altmetric statistics badge.

Researcher Pages

A project between @Mire and The World Bank's Open Knowledge Repository is to add author pages to DSpace. Thus far, it appears that it shows the author's name, a photo of the author, their biography, and a list of their item's in DSpace that they are an author of.
This is in use at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/author-page?author=Abras%2C+Ana+Luisa


Altmetrics Statistics Badge

For articles that have a DOI, you can integrate with the Altmetrics statistics service to display a badge of alternative usage of that article. Altmetrics are things like people citing the paper, mentioning them in a social network or blog, or adding it to your Mendeley library. I've seen this integrated into DSpace by Longsight's Sam Ottenhoff for Marine Biology Laboratory / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Open Access Server.


See DSpace and Altmetric's in use at: https://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/handle/1912/6598