[OAI-implementers] questions

[Pete Johnston]

> EAD to OAI DC questions:
> 
> Is there an EAD to OAI DC transform available?  If not, where 
> are the EAD to OAI DC mappings mentioned in the 
> "Implementation Guidelines for the OAI-PMH" document? 

There are probably others on this list with more recent practical
experience of this than me, but for some basic suggested mappings, see
appendix B3 of the EAD Application Guidelines

http://lcweb.loc.gov/ead/ag/agappb.html#sec3

Note that an EAD document contains descriptions of the EAD document
itself and descriptions of units of archival material, so you need to be
clear about which resource(s) you wish your OAI DC record to describe.
And if it is the archival material, you may end up generating many
(possibly thousands) of simple DC records for the content of a single
EAD document.

I suspect if you enquired on the EAD listserv, you might find someone
had an XSLT transform. I'd qualify that by saying that EAD is quite
flexible, and there are (often quite significant) variations in the way
different implementers use EAD to encode their archival finding aids, so
you may find that any supplied transform needs some customisation for
your EAD dataset - and if that dataset is drawn from multiple sources
using varying encoding conventions the complexity of a
"one-size-fits-all" transform rapidly increases, I think.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it may not be straightforward
;-)

There's a good treatment of these issues in

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=544255&coll=portal&dl=ACM

http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/InterimReport/jcdl2002.ppt
http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/SAA2002.ppt

Cheers

Pete
------- 
Pete Johnston 
Interoperability Research Officer 
UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK 
tel: +44 (0)1225 383619    fax: +44 (0)1225 386838 
mailto:p.johnston@ukoln.ac.uk 
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/p.johnston/