[OAI-implementers] Automatically gathering the full-text of eprints

[Tim Brody]

We've done a preliminary implementation of this at Southampton for:
eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk
and
eprints.soton.ac.uk

It took me about an hour to do, I suspect Chris did it in much less time :-)

All the best,
Tim.

Andy Powell wrote:
> The JISC-funded ePrints UK project has a requirement to automatically
> harvest both metadata and full-text from the eprint archives within UK
> academia (and potentially elsewhere).  This is so that we can pass both
> metadata and full-text to the various 'enhancement' Web services offered
> by our partners.
> 
> http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/
> 
> In order for our harvesting robot to be able to do this, it must be able
> to reliably (and automatically) determine the correct URL(s) for the
> various full-text manifestation(s) (HTML, PDF, RTF, etc.) of each eprint.
> 
> Our "Using simple Dublin Core to describe eprints" guidelines are intended
> to encourage greater consistency in the metadata that is exposed by eprint
> archives using the 'oai_dc' format within the OAI Protocol for Metadata
> Harvesting (OAI-PMH).  Somewhat perversely, because we stick rigidly to
> the semantics of the DC element set, our guidelines make determining the
> URL of each manifestation that is available quite difficult.  (This is
> largely a consequence of the 'simple' nature of 'simple DC'!).  In
> general, the URL in the <dc:identifier> element of the oai_dc record is
> the URL of a jump-off page, rather than a direct link to the full-text.
> 
> We would like to suggest a new proposal for unambiguously embedding the
> URL for each manifestation of an eprint into the (X)HTML jump-off page for
> that eprint.  Since the jump-off page is generated automatically by the
> eprint archive software, doing this shouldn't be too difficult (in fact,
> we would hope that archive software, such as eprints.org, will be
> configured to do this out of the box).
> 
> If this proposal is adopted, it will make it much easier to write OAI
> service provider software that can reliably gather the full-text of an
> eprint, given only the oai_dc record for that eprint.
> 
> The proposal is at
> 
> http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/encoding-fulltext-links/
> 
> Comments are welcome,
> 
> Andy
> --
> Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell/      +44 1225 383933
> Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
> ECDL 2004, Bath, UK - 12-17 Sept 2004 - http://www.ecdl2004.org/
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