Millards Corner » CONTENTdm

Harvesting CONTENTdm by way of OAI-PMH

millarj — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 13:43:44 +0000

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

CONTENTdm to DSpace

millarj — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:17:51 +0000

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.

Integrating LDAP Authentication into ContentDM

millarj — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:47:26 +0000

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.

Prior to the upgrade, we had just created usernames and passwords and protected the administrative interface pages with a standard htaccess file. We had a couple of accounts created, but basically everyone used the ADMIN username and password. That meant distributing the password around and letting everyone know when that password changed. We also had a student account that we were forced to change the password for everytime a student employee graduated.

So, with the upgrade, we decided to switch over to authenticating against the University’s ldap server instead. This way, everyone would use their campus password and we just restrict access on username.

According to the CONTENTdm faq:

Does CONTENTdm support authentication via LDAP? CONTENTdm relies on the underlying Web server for authentication services. The Apache LDAP authentication module enables authentication via LDAP. Consult the Apache/LDAP documentation for details.

Here’s how to do it on Apache2 Running on Debian Stable (etch)

Enable mod_ldap and mod_authnz_ldap

a2enmod ldap
a2enmod authnz_ldap
Create a new .htaccess file in /content42_install_directory/cgi-bin/admin/ that looks like this (customized with your ldap server URL):
AuthType Basic AuthName "Server Admin" AuthBasicProvider ldap AuthLDAPURL "ldap://ldapserver/ou=users,o=mu" AuthzLDAPAuthoritative off Require valid-user
Make sure /contentdm_install_directory/conf/users.txt has a line with full admin privileges for your ldap username
admin_username AC DC UP:$ALL BD ED AR DL CF RE
Now, force restart your Apache2 server
/etc/init.d/apache2 force-restart
That’s it. Login and see if it works. If it does, you can add more admin or whatever users using the admin interface

UPDATE: If you want to allow LDAP authentication AS WELL as some non-LDAP usernames (like general purpose users, outside collaborators etc) Add this line to your .htaccess file

AuthUserFile = /path/to/htpasswdfile

and change the line that reads:

AuthBasicProvider ldap


to read:
AuthBasicProvider ldap file

If you don't have a htpasswd file (you should as the CDM4 initial install asks you to create one) you can create it with the htpasswd command like this:
htpasswd -c /path/to/htpasswdfile firstusername



Ohio CONTENTdm Users Group Conference
millarj — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:00:11 +0000
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)