[OAI-implementers] Harvesting DC records for DDI system

[eric casteleijn]

> We would like to make the system search the UK Data Archive (UKDA) - as 
> the UKDA does not use VDC we are looking at being able to harvest their 
> records. The UKDA have a test OAI service but this only contains a 
> reduced Dublin Core record for each of their catalogue entries and it 
> seems that the VDC system will only harvest DDI metadata. Has any body 
> got any experience of what would be needed to harvest DC records and put 
> them into DDI. At first glance it seems that DC and DDI map pretty well.
> 
> Any advice on how this would be done and how much work it would take 
> would be much appreciated.

If the needed DDI-fields are there in the DC metadata, an xslt 
transformation could be used to translate the harvested xml to the 
format you need. (I have no experience with DDI, so I can't really say 
how hard or easy this will be, but I don't think it'll be very hard). 
You could then have an intermediate server that harvests UKDA and 
provides an OAI service with the metadata in DDI. This can probably 
achieved in a lot of ways, but at least one of them is using the open 
source pyoai package (full disclosure: I work for the company who makes 
that, but it is available free of charge through cvs here: 
cvs.infrae.com/pyoai/), which provides both OAIPMH client and server 
software. Putting just a thin xslt-layer between harvester and server 
should not be that hard in Python.

eric casteleijn
infrae