Integrating Atom with external repositories (by importing <dao> links)

[Creighton Barrett]

Hello,

I'm curious to hear if anyone is integrating Atom with an external repository (e.g., Fedora, dSpace).  I know we can use Atom's digital object upload feature, but we'd like to store our objects centrally in another repository and link to them via finding aids published in Atom.  Are there any examples people can point me towards? 

Our EAD generally has digital object links encoded as follows:

- <c02 id="ref58" level="file">

- <did>

- <unittitle>

  File title

  <genreform rules="RAD" source="RAD">[electronic resource]</genreform>

  </unittitle>

  <unitid>TEST_EAD_ComponentID</unitid>

- <langmaterial>

  <language langcode="que" />

  </langmaterial>

- <physdesc>

  <extent>2.0 folders</extent>

  </physdesc>

  <unitdate>2000 - 2011</unitdate>

  </did>

- <dao ns2:actuate="onRequest" ns2:show="new" ns2:title="File title [electronic resource]" ns2:href="http://www.dal.ca/example_digitalobject_ID">

- <daodesc>

  <p>Click to view digital objects</p>

  </daodesc>

  </dao>

  </c02>

This imports into Atom, but the <dao> is not displayed.  We could probably map the <dao> to the Reference Code area, but we were going to try and map our container information there, so we need another spot for the URIs.  Any ideas? 

Another, related question - is it possible to display digital objects that are not uploaded via the digital object upload?  Is there a way to display a thumbnail stored in another repository? 

Thanks,

Creighton
Dalhousie University

[David Juhasz]

Hi Creighton,

We haven't done any integration with ICA-AtoM and Fedora, dSpace or any
other external repository, but I can respond to your questions about
digital object linking.

ICA-AtoM does allow linking to external digital objects via URI. You
can link a remote digital object via the web UI, by following the steps
for http://ica-atom.org/doc/Upload_digital_objects and using the "Link
to an external digital object" field (see attached screenshot). A local
reference representation (scaled to fit the ICA-AtoM archival
description template) and a thumbnail representation of the remote
digital object will be created and stored on the ICA-AtoM server, but
the "master" representation exists only as a link to the original resource.

At the code level we've had some success, at a purely experimental
level, with importing digital objects via linked URI or base64 embedding
in a *METS* import profile. You can see the import configuration for
the METS profile here (lines 108 - 115):
http://code.google.com/p/qubit-toolkit/source/browse/trunk/apps/qubit/modules/object/config/import/mets.yml

The code above calls the "importFromUri()" method in the Digital Object
class:
http://code.google.com/p/qubit-toolkit/source/browse/trunk/lib/model/QubitDigitalObject.php#510

Hope that helps!

David

--
David Juhasz,
Software Engineer

Artefactual Systems Inc.
www.artefactual.com