[OAI-general] Changes in OAI-PMH support in DSpace at MIT

[Tansley, Robert]

All,

As mentioned in previous mails, there are a couple of changes to the OAI-PMH data provision service of DSpace at MIT:

- We've changed the identifiers used to conform to the OAI identifier spec

- A couple of changes 'touch' every item in the system.  For example, internally in DSpace authors are stored as qualified DC 'contributor.author'.  When exporting via OAI-PMH, these authors are mapped to the unqualified 'creator' element to fit community practices and expectations.

- Set structure changed to expose collection structure (and not communities, which are like to change over time)

- The old base URL slightly confused people, and also made it difficult to deploy stylesheets and so forth in the OAI-PMH webapp, allowing browser-based 'harvesting'.

So, the base URL of the OAI-PMH data provision service at DSpace at MIT has changed to:

http://dspace.mit.edu/oai/request

Please update your records accordingly.

This is essentially a 'new' repository.  If you've previously been harvesting DSpace, and wish to link records previously harvested to those in the new system, the identifier mapping is pretty simple.  The previous identifier was simply the item's Handle, e.g:

hdl:1721.1/123456

The new identifier contains an OAI identifier prefix, with the same suffix:

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123456

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause, however this seemed the best route forward given the various issues involved.

 Robert Tansley / Digital Media Systems Programme / HP Labs
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Robert_Tansley/