Cross-institution Parties experiment

[Greg Pendlebury]

Heyo folks,

Just some brief notes on experimental work others may be interested in. There are a couple topics of discussion coming up lately, and two of them came together for me:

• How to include cross-institutional Parties?
• How to ingest RIF-CS?

In starting to look at the second issue, I thought rather then jump straight into a complication collection I could kill two birds with one stone and OAI-PMH harvest Research Data Australia for more light-weight Party records. I've added them them into the dev server after it all worked ok on my laptop.

The build notes are here: http://code.google.com/p/redbox-mint/wiki/DevServerRDAExperiment
and they refer to some documents attached to this post. I'm hoping once I mail this out I can link them to the document... but I may just upload them to the dev site.

The dev server shows this here: http://redbox-dev.cqu.edu.au/mint/rda_parties/search and they are tied into the dev server's ReDBox forms. So now if there is a Party in RDA, then ReDBox can see them in the forms.

Anyway, this is, most firmly, just an experiment I started putting together last night as a practice for getting RIF-CS Collections into ReDBox, and not a solution we'll commit to for Parties. There is NLA and ANDS working coming on that front.

What it did highlight for me is that there are REALLY wide differences in how people are structuring their Party entries in RDA (including some invalid records), so for Collections (which are way more complicated) this approach will be very tightly scoped to just provide the framework on getting RIF-CS into the system, and maintaining the integrity of any persistent IDs the data has already been published under. Implementers are going to have to setup the parsing of the XML into form data, aside from some basic examples on mandatory fields.

Ta,
Greg