prep for Friday morning Showcase 2007...

I've finished the basic work for my Friday AM Showcase 2007 session. These are the key articles and concepts:
The use of extended metadata formats is essential in supporting OAI-PMH-based resource harvesting. Two extended formats have been enabled on the WSU Research Exchange system.

The "Resource harvesting within the OAI-PMH framework article" provides a detailed look at this topic, particularly in defining the two specific problems involved in using Dublin Core:

• problems with "locating the resource based on information provided in dc.identifier"
• inability to effectively use the "OAI-PMH datestamp to trigger resource harvesting": this facet of this problem pertains to the use of identifier to link to either the bitstream [to be preserved] or to an intermediate, splash-screen that provides a hyperlink for the bitstream.
  field describes the most recent update of the metadata, leading to the issues shown in Table 1 of the article.

Figure 1 provides a useful view of OAI-PMH resource harvesting. These levels are described:

-resource: the digital resource to be preserved; as noted by the authors, "resources themselves are outside of the scope of the OAI-PMH."

-item: "the highest-level entity within the scope of the OAI-PMH"; "uniquely identified by an OAI-PMH identifier."

-records: the metadata formats supported on the Research Exchange system are: Dublin Core, MPEG-21 DIDL and METS.

It's suprising just how few of the DSpace instances worldwide have enabled the complex metadata formats.