OAI PMH special characters not rendering

[Rachel Wang]

Hi Everyone!

We're reaching out to see if others have encountered special character encoding issues in OAI-PMH records. Several institutions we support are seeing malformed metadata in fields like dc.title and dc.description.abstract, where apostrophes appear as ' for example, ABC's University renders as ABC's University.
We've addressed this by applying a custom logic in our etdms.xsl and oai_dc.xsl crosswalk files:

<xsl:template name="fix-apostrophe"> <xsl:param name="text"/> <xsl:choose> <xsl:when test="contains($text, '&amp;apos;')"> <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, '&amp;apos;')"/> <xsl:text>'</xsl:text> <xsl:call-template name="fix-apostrophe"> <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, '&amp;apos;')"/> </xsl:call-template> </xsl:when> <xsl:otherwise> <xsl:value-of select="$text"/> </xsl:otherwise> </xsl:choose> </xsl:template>


<description> <xsl:call-template name="fix-apostrophe"> <xsl:with-param name="text" select="."/> </xsl:call-template> </description>

Since many institutions have their OAI-PMH feeds harvested by third parties this issue has downstream impact. Our team has noticed it's a widespread issue with commonly harvested metadata fields. Has anyone else run into this? And would there be interest in our team submitting this as a Github Issue/PR fix? Thank you Community! Best Regards, Rachel