JISC

Overview

The interest in exploiting the content to be found in institutional repositories is growing. At the same time, there is a range of possible uses for a central cache of metadata records held by institutional repositories. Most notably, with a recent emphasis on 'rapid innovation', there exists an opportunity to position this aggregation of data to support research and development generally in the fields of metadata and/or repositories. Rapid innovation projects which require a corpus of metadata to work with will benefit from this readily available data-store, avoiding the resource-intensive overhead of developing their own harvesting and aggregation solution

Aims and objectives

• To provide a heterogeneous metadata store which consists of a managed aggregation of regularly harvested IR metadata record 
• To provide a simple, RESTful API primarily to serve third-party retrieval of harvested records 
• To provide feeds of subsets of this aggregated metadata to various R&D projects according to their specific needs negotiated with the project team 
• To prototype a business intelligence reporting service, providing visualisations of result sets from queries based on the aggregated store 
• To engage in technical knowledge sharing with related projects

Project methodology

As the foundations for the harvesting and aggregation components already exist, the priority in terms of development will be to to find appropriate solutions for individual R&D projects which want to exploit this aggregation. The approach to achieving this will be one of close negotiation between the developers in this project and those in the ‘consuming’ project, adhering to one of the central tenets of the Agile approach to software development. The business intelligence consuming service will be addressed in the a similar way, although in this case the negotiations will happen between the project’s development team and the JISC Executive.
Software will be developed in a publicly accessible source-code repository.

Anticipated outputs and outcomes

This project will produce:

• A heterogeneous metadata store which consists of a managed aggregation of regularly harvested IR metadata records
• A prototype business intelligence reporting system
• Tailored feeds for a number of R&D projects

Technology / Standards used (if applicable)

• OAI-PMH