WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway and ArchivesSpace

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Sarah Shepherd

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Oct 22, 2025, 10:19:53 AMOct 22
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Hi all,

We are in the process of setting up our instance to be harvested by WorldCat. We have our instance loaded into the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway all set, but we are having some difficulty with figuring out the metadata map. We are using the system default map and then editing it slightly. We figured out how to remove certain fields from being mapped, but we are getting some weird results like some of our subjects on the collection record are mapped to the coverage field while other subjects are in the subject field. The system is pretty opaque on directions. 

Does anyone have experience with the metadata map on WorldCat Digital Collections Gateway and has gone through this process? I would greatly appreciate any advice!

Thanks,
Sarah


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Sarah Shepherd (she/her)
Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library
Archivist
33 Marrett Road, Lexington, MA 02421
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Michelle Paquette

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Oct 24, 2025, 4:10:29 PMOct 24
to Sarah Shepherd, Archivesspace_Users_Group
Hi Sarah,

I haven't yet completed going through this process, but I was also trying to set ours up at Smith and mostly wondered about whether the records that got harvested would then get harvested into ArchiveGrid or not, and what I might need to change about the mapping to make that happen. Have you thought about this aspect at all? If you have I'd love to chat with you about this. Also happy to discuss the mapping though I'm not sure how helpful I'd be at this point. Feel free to reach out to me off-list if you'd like to discuss further!

Best,
Michelle

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Michelle Paquette
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Metadata & Technical Services Archivist
Special Collections
Smith College

fla...@g.ucla.edu

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Oct 30, 2025, 11:27:38 AMOct 30
to Michelle Paquette, Sarah Shepherd, Archivesspace_Users_Group

I’m also in a very early stage of exploring use of the Gateway for harvesting our ArchivesSpace records (at UCLA) to OCLC. One aspect of the workflow really puzzles me: If “During the harvest, the Gateway transforms the Dublin Core records to WorldCat MARC records” (as described here), why doesn’t the Gateway accept OAI MARC as one of the schemas it can harvest? ArchivesSpace can serve OAI MARC, but the Gateway accepts only OAI DC. In translating to Dublin Core and then to MARC, granular semantics in the original AS descriptions are lost and the MARC records made less standards compliant.

 

I wonder if the Gateway accepts only OAI DC because that schema aligns well enough with the simpler metadata applied to traditional digital collections, compared to which archives metadata are an edge case. If this is so, perhaps the archives community should initiate a discussion with OCLC to plan a separate harvesting mechanism.

 

Francis

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