OCS METS Gateway Plugin

[Scott]

Hi,

At The Australian National University we're investigating the archiving of Open Conference System conferences as part of APSR (http://www.apsr.edu.au) and are developing a gateway plugin which, when enabled, exposes the papers for an entire series or a single scheduled conference in a METS format. It also provides access to individual papers and supporting materials in order that follow-on applications processing the METS packages can access files referenced by the METS FLocat element (as opposed to embedding content as in OJS Native Export). The METS will be conformant to the Australian METS Conference Profile (a sub-profile of the Australian METS Profile). The Australian METS Profile is about to be lodged with the Library of Congress and the Conference Profile will also be submitted as part of our development in a few weeks' time.

Does this sound like something that would be useful to be incorporated into the OCS code base? Our developer is being careful to use the same XML helper classes as already exists in OCS to this end. It is all pretty much new code so is easily installed at any rate.

Note that if this sounds useful, we could also contribute a journal version which would be compliant with the Australian METS Journal Profile. This profile is being submitted today to Library of Congress for official registration along with the Australian METS Profile. We currently transform the Native OJS format to METS via an XSL workflow outside OJS, but OJS is so similar to OCS it's not a big stretch for us to contribute back a METS Journal Gateway plugin so METS can be generated natively from OJS.

Is the development team interested in this work? I am happy to forward the completed code for OCS once done (probably 3-4 weeks' time) for review and possible inclusion if a contact point can be nominated. If this sounds useful we can follow up with the OJS version later this year.

Scott.

[mj]

Hi Scott,

We would most definitely be interested in sharing your METS export code as part of the OCS code. If you have a copy of / link to the Australian METS Profile (and conference/journal sub-profiles), I'd be interested to have a look at it to become more familiar with it. In terms of integrating it into OCS, I would strongly recommend that your developer implement it as an OCS export plug-in. Have them take a look at the OJS Technical Reference, which is pertinent for OCS as well: http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs_documentation. This would make it much easier to port it to OJS, as well as for us to include it in future OJS/OCS releases without having to modify the code substantially. Please do feel free to follow up with me directly (I believe you have my email address; otherwise it's in my profile) or the PKP support address on these exciting developments!

Cheers,

[Scott]

Hi MJ,

We will be creating a Gateway export initially as we need a METS export service as opposed to an export, however an export implementation would be fairly trivial.

Information on the METS profile can currently be found at http://pilot.apsr.edu.au/wiki/index.php ... TS_Profile, some background on the METS project can also be found at: http://pilot.apsr.edu.au/wiki/index.php ... evelopment. This is version 0.2, 0.3 has just been released and should be up on the Wiki shortly (very minor changes from 0.2). 0.3 will be the version submitted to LOC.

The NLA is currently working on setting up a web site with much more info, but not sure when that will be available (not too far away though).

Will send you more info as the registration process progresses, and will send some code once initial version has been tested.

Scott.