Location
Dover Library Large Conference Room
Start Date
6-6-2025 1:30 PM
End Date
6-6-2025 2:00 PM
Description
In this presentation, I will discuss my experience harvesting metadata from Digital Commons holdings records into WorldCat Discovery via OCLC’s WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. This is a self-service client that allows librarians to configure and enable metadata harvesting for any or all collections within their OAI-compliant repositories into WorldCat Discovery, thus increasing the visibility and discoverability of those records. WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway works more seamlessly with OCLC’s own CONTENTdm repository product, but it can also be used to harvest metadata from Digital Commons, with WorldCat records linking directly to the repository content itself. Gardner-Webb has chosen to harvest metadata primarily from archival records, but any repository collections you want to make more visible can obviously benefit from being incorporated into the WorldCat database.
I will briefly address the procedures for setting up a Gateway account; adding users to that account; configuring, adding, and managing your repository settings; and assigning individual collections to different users, if desired. Most of my presentation will be devoted to the metadata mapping process and a demonstration of the preview capability that allows you to work with the appearance of data before enabling the harvesting process itself. Metadata mapping based on Dublin Core allows you to configure the best possible (though not necessarily ideal) display of metadata information in WorldCat. While it can be tricky to get some of your data to display the way you would like it to in WorldCat, the mapping process does provide a serviceable means of configuring the display of your records before enabling the data harvesting process itself. Once selected collections in Digital Commons are set up and enabled, newly created records can be synced up manually or via regularly scheduled automatic sync updates for metadata harvesting. There is some flexibility built into the system – you can choose which collections to enable for metadata harvesting, and each enabled collection can have its own metadata mapping and sync details setup, which allows for different types of repository records to be displayed as effectively as possible and for records harvesting to take place on a schedule most convenient for each collection.
Finally, I will display some of our harvested repository records in WorldCat and encourage discussion about the quality of those records. I hope to solicit feedback on more effective metadata mapping strategies and ideas to improve the quality of our own harvested records while also demonstrating to attendees the current benefits and drawbacks of using OCLC’s WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway to harvest Digital Commons metadata into WorldCat Discovery.
Metadata Harvesting via the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway
Dover Library Large Conference Room
In this presentation, I will discuss my experience harvesting metadata from Digital Commons holdings records into WorldCat Discovery via OCLC’s WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. This is a self-service client that allows librarians to configure and enable metadata harvesting for any or all collections within their OAI-compliant repositories into WorldCat Discovery, thus increasing the visibility and discoverability of those records. WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway works more seamlessly with OCLC’s own CONTENTdm repository product, but it can also be used to harvest metadata from Digital Commons, with WorldCat records linking directly to the repository content itself. Gardner-Webb has chosen to harvest metadata primarily from archival records, but any repository collections you want to make more visible can obviously benefit from being incorporated into the WorldCat database.
I will briefly address the procedures for setting up a Gateway account; adding users to that account; configuring, adding, and managing your repository settings; and assigning individual collections to different users, if desired. Most of my presentation will be devoted to the metadata mapping process and a demonstration of the preview capability that allows you to work with the appearance of data before enabling the harvesting process itself. Metadata mapping based on Dublin Core allows you to configure the best possible (though not necessarily ideal) display of metadata information in WorldCat. While it can be tricky to get some of your data to display the way you would like it to in WorldCat, the mapping process does provide a serviceable means of configuring the display of your records before enabling the data harvesting process itself. Once selected collections in Digital Commons are set up and enabled, newly created records can be synced up manually or via regularly scheduled automatic sync updates for metadata harvesting. There is some flexibility built into the system – you can choose which collections to enable for metadata harvesting, and each enabled collection can have its own metadata mapping and sync details setup, which allows for different types of repository records to be displayed as effectively as possible and for records harvesting to take place on a schedule most convenient for each collection.
Finally, I will display some of our harvested repository records in WorldCat and encourage discussion about the quality of those records. I hope to solicit feedback on more effective metadata mapping strategies and ideas to improve the quality of our own harvested records while also demonstrating to attendees the current benefits and drawbacks of using OCLC’s WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway to harvest Digital Commons metadata into WorldCat Discovery.