Geospatial Librarian

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a framework that can be used to pull metadata records from enabled repositories.  The records are transferred in a simple Dublin Core XML format.  This is an open and well documented framework, and there are many tools available that can perform metadata harvests. The method for requesting the records uses a URL that has been set up by the repository.  Refining the request can come in the form of “Sets” or sub-collections, and “From” or “Until” for records added between a period of time.  Some repositories may have published their OAI-PMH URLs, but others may only release them upon request. The records are harvested as Dublin Core XML, but use a dedicated schema ( http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd ), prefix (oai_dc), and namespace ( http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/ ) .  These may need to be transformed if importing the records into an editor. Here...

Note: This is the first in a series of posts that examines the next stage of the CIC GDDP project: incorporating maps. 18th Century Map of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), held at the John R. Borchert Map Library, University of Minnesota One of the exciting aspects of the CIC Geospatial Data Discovery project is that we are gathering geospatial resources in the form of both GIS records and scanned map images. These two types of resources differ from one another in terms of repositories and metadata standards. Most of our GIS records are from public agencies, such as a state’s department of natural resources and are described with the FGDC or ISO standard. Most of the maps are from University libraries and are described with the MARC or Dublin Core standard. Combining these resources into one portal presents challenges in to form of choosing compatible metadata standards and appropriate tools. The initial decision of the task force was to convert all resources into the ISO19...