Seeking guidance on how to set up people entities

[Genny Jon_York]

(Cross-posted to DSpace Technical Support)

Hi everyone, 

We would love some info on what overall steps are required to plan for Person and other entities. 

We are most interested in implementing Person entities to start. Some preliminary questions:

1. Is there a way to populate existing author records into Person entities?
2. Duplicate author entries 
   • collapse/combine before implementing?
   • can they be deleted/combined after implementation?
3. Other metadata clean up recommendations before proceeding?

Once implemented, would we need to create a Person entity record for each new author prior to creating a new publication record? 

• Are Person entities required for all authors, even external collaborators?
• Recommendations for handling Person entities for self-submitted records that dspace administrators may never see?

Many thanks for any info/tips experience you can share.

Best,

Genny Jon, York University, Toronto

[Fatih Güneş]

Hi Genny,
I will try to answer your questions in short.
Q: Is there a way to populate existing author records into Person entities?
A: Yes. Create a collection for it. Then import all your Person data into that collection. Don't forget to add metadata dspace.entity.type:Person to each record.

Q: collapse/combine before implementing?
A: surely, it is better to do the cleaning before transformation.

Q: can they be deleted/combined after implementation?
A: yes, but better before (you won't do a mistake when creating a relationship)

Q: Other metadata clean up recommendations before proceeding?
A: Nothing special. Just clean and tidy your metadata. Don't forget to add dspace.entity.type:Publication to Research Output to trasform them from Items to Publications.

Q: Once implemented, would we need to create a Person entity record for each new author prior to creating a new publication record?
A: Yes. (see answer below)

Q: Are Person entities required for all authors, even external collaborators?
A: It depends on your strategy. It is possible. But as best practice from our implementations, we only create peson entities for institution authors. We leave external authors just as plain text.

Q: Recommendations for handling Person entities for self-submitted records that dspace administrators may never see?
A: I see person entities as catalogue records. So I would not let Person entities for self-submissions. A workflow can be defined for administrators to be aware of as well.

I hope my answers help.
BR
Fatih

[Genny Jon_York]

Thanks Fatih!

I'm assuming the person data is from our authors list/index. Do we need to do any special handling of the person data before importing? 

Best,

Genny

[Fatih Güneş]

Dear Genny,

I advice two things:

1 - Add a unique identifier (corporate staff number or something similar) to each record. This will help you in the future if there are two person with the same name!

2 - Add as much global identifier as you can as metadata like; ResearcherId (rid), scopusauthorid, orcid, etc.

Pls check the Person entity collection our latest implementation of Dspace at: Ozyegin University Person Collection

Fatih