I needed to find a quick way to harvest the dublin core metadata from a CONTENTdm collection, without being able to export it out of the admin interface. A little PHP, the CONTENTdm OAI-PMH interface, and some experimentation on the Open Archives Repository Explorer (http://re.cs.uct.ac.za/) and I was able to come up with this quick hack in php. Presented here in case it is ever useful to anyone besides myself.
http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~millarj/cdmtab2dspace/oai-harvest.php
There are probably lots of ways to do this, but this is mine. As part of our migration to the OhioLINK DRC I’ve created a quick php script to 1) take the default export format of CONTENTdm, 2) translate a mapping of fields to the appropriate dSpace ones, and 3) create the DSpace bulk submission package for it. You will need php5+ running on a unix-like system with allow_fopen set to true. It may work on Windows, but I haven’t tested it and I probably won’t. You could upgrade your Windows Installation and have better luck though.
You can find the scripts here. CAVEAT: These are ugly hacks at best http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~millarj/cdmtab2dspace/
Instructions:
- Export your data from CONTENTdm in the control panel. Select a Tab Delimited export and make sure to check “Return field names in first record”
- Next, open the resulting text file in a spreadsheet application of your choice. If you don’t want to munge dates and other non-text data, make sure each column is imported as the “Text” type. Excel for example, has a hard time with ISO dates.
- Add a row to the top of the spreadsheet and place the appropriate DSpace fieladn mes (minus the dc. prefix) above the CONTENTdm field to be mapped. If you want to skip a field, just use “skip” as the DSpace field label.
- Save it back out as a tab-delimited file.
- Download the script and edit it to customize to your hearts content.
- Run the script from a unix/linux/macosx commandline “php cdmtab2dspace.php”
At the top of the script are various customizations/configurations. To see how things will look, set $test_mode = “on” When ready to run it live, change that bit to “off”
In particular, customize/rewrite the “move_bitstreams” function to, you guessed it, move the bitstreams (digital objects) from wherever you have them into the submission package.
We just finished upgrading our installation of CONTENTdm to version 4.2 (now that 4.3 is just around the corner) and decided to change the way we did administrative access. It’s not difficult or brain surgery, but here’s the procedure in case anyone else wants an easy step-by-step.
Read more…
Jody Perkins and I presented a poster session today at the OCLC sponsored CONTENTdm users group meeting. Our poster discussed preliminary work implementing FAST Facets in CONTENTdm and a simple system to allow tagging of FAST-like concepts in oral history transcripts.
You can download a copy of the poster, in smaller, easier to carry PDF. ( courtesy of Scribd)