The University of Illinois Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Project
ASP OAI 2.0 Data Provider
File System -- ver. 1.5
Descriptive Metadata and Administrative Information
Stored in Text Files as XML
Disclaimer: The following is 'quick and dirty' documentation to get you started. It assumes a fair amount of
familiarity with configuring the Microsoft IIS web server and other minutia such as
editing text files, etc. Hopefully, we will eventually have time for some better documentation. Thanks.
WHAT THIS IS:
This is an example of a metadata provider service as described in release 2.0 of the
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Metadata for each item is stored in a separate text file in XML format. These files are placed in one or more subdirectories of the virtual directory containing the oai.asp program. Each subdirectory defines a set.
This implementation uses the following technologies:
- Microsoft Internet Information Server;
- Microsoft ASP with VBScript and JScript;
- Microsoft Windows Script;
- Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML).
This application can be downloaded onto an appropriately configured
Microsoft Windows NT/2000 system and used with minimal configuration changes.
Note: Related implementations for other system architectures (Database only,
File System only, File System/Database hybrid, etc) and/or for other platforms
are also available on the
SourceForge UILIB-OAI project web
.
INSTALLATION:
-
Unpack the downloaded zip file to install all files into the root directory of the C
drive (C:\) on a system running Microsoft IIS ver. 4 or later. (Installation into
a different directory is possible, but may require significant changes to the example
database and scripts. These dependencies may be removed in a future release.)
You must also preserve subdirectory names during unzipping.
A directory named C:\ASP_OAI_2.0_DP_FS\ will be created and contains
all necessary program files and sample data files.
-
Make the C:\ASP_OAI_2.0_DP_FS\ directory available as an
IIS virtual application (Create a new Virtual Directory with an
active application. Make sure that this application allows scripting access.
For information on how to do this refer to the IIS documentation.)
Assume that the name of the virtual directory is ASPOAIDP-FS.
-
Now the base URL of the ASP OAI 2.0 Data Provider for File System 1.5 is running
at your local system is:
http://<your hostname or IP>/ASPOAIDP-FS/oai.asp
You should test the installation from browsers at local and remote sites
with the following command:
http://<your hostname or IP>/ASPOAIDP-FS/oai.asp?verb=Identify
We have frequently found that firewalls must be re-configured to allow access
from remote sites.
-
This data provider can be configured through the XML configuration file:
RepositoryDescription.xml .
Repository identity and metadata properties can be customized.
ASSUMPTIONS:
-
Each XML metadata item is described in a separate .xml text file.
-
If an item is a member of two sets, it may be described in two files, each placed in a different subdirectory.
- At least one set is mandatory. Sets are defined as subdirectories below the virtual directory root (e.g. ASPOAIDP-FS).
Sets may have subsets. Sets may or may not contain .xml files, although if they do not, then they
should contain at least one subset which does contain .xml files. The sample sets included with this pageage are named SET1 and SET2.
SET2 contains a subset (subfolder) named SUBSETA. Each of these 3 sets contains at least one .xml file.
- All .xml files at the root (ASPOAIDP-FS) level are ignored by the harvester. If you wish, you may use
the root directory to store system documention or other non-harvestable data in .xml form.
-
For each supported metadata format, the user must
provide a handler (in the form of an ASP file) which reads the metadata
records and converts or transforms these records into the specified metadata
format. In this release, we provide three handlers (metadata-oai_dc.asp,
metadata-marc.asp, and metadata-marc_direct.asp) as examples.
Both metadata-oai_dc.asp and metadata-marc.asp use the XSLT technology
to transform the metadata from the original format (we use MARC records as
examples) into the specified formats. metadata-marc_direct.asp is an example
handler which outputs the metadata directly without any processing.
ARCHITECTURE:
- Operating System / Platform
- Microsoft Windows NT 4 Server SP 6
- Microsoft Windows NT 4 Workstation SP 6
- Microsoft 2000 Advanced Server
- Microsoft 2000 Professional, SP 2
-
- Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), version 4 or higher
-
- Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP)
- ASP modules included use VBScript and JScript
-
- Microsoft Windows Script, version 5.6 or higher
- The script support object library is available free from the Microsoft Website at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/nhp/Default.asp?contentid=28001169
-
- Microsoft XML Parser (MSXML) 4.0
- This parser is available free from the Microsoft Website at
http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml
OAI PROTOCOL CONFORMANCE & XML Schema Definition Documents for Validation:
As installed locally, this system has been validated using version 1.45a of
the OAI Repository Explorer (available at
http://jingluo.dlib.vt.edu/~oai/cgi-bin/Explorer/2.0-1.45/testoai).
The OAI Repository Explorer tests for conformance to OAI Protocol release
2.0. When you have you have completed installing this tool and believe everything is set up properly, go
to this site and enter the URL for your data to validate your system.
INCLUDED FILES:
- global.asa
- The global.asa file retrieves parameters from RepositoryDescription.xml to
configure the repository. It also makes a one-time list of all sets and data available which is
used by all harvesters. If sets or files are added or deleted, the application must be
stopped and restarted to refresh this list.
- RepositoryDescription.xml
- The configuration file for the OAI Data Provider.
It is XML-formatted and self-illustrative.
Please refer to the file for repository settings.
- README.html
- This HTML file.
- license.html
- The Open Source license for this code.
- functions.inc
-
This contains various functions that are needed by other script files.
This file is included in the scripts that need access to the functions.
functions.inc provides functions and subroutines such as parsing OAI identifiers,
generating UTC datestamps, creating and parsing resumption tokens, etc.
These are mostly functions that should be reusable across many different
OAI implementations and are not specific to this implementation.
- oai.asp
- The main Active Server Page script code. All OAI requests are dispatched by oai.asp.
Most of this code is written in VBScript, a small amount of JScript is also used.
- *.asp (other than oai.asp and metadata-*.asp)
-
Each of these ASP files corresponds to a single OAI request and is called by oai.asp.
- metadata-*.asp
-
User-provided handlers for supported metadata formats. In this release, we provide
three examples: metadata-oai_dc.asp, metadata-marc.asp, and metadata-marc_direct.asp
to demonstrate how this data provider works with user-provided handlers.
- Identity.xls
-
Files with names ending in .xls transform metadata from the storage XML format,
MARC in the case of the data samples provided with this package, into the format
requested by a harvester. Identity.xls translates from the MARC storage format
into the MARC format expected by harvesters. As you can imagine,
this transformation is trivial.
- MARC21slim2OAIDC.xsl
- MARC21slimUtils.xsl
-
These sample stylesheets transform the sample MARC formatted metadata
into Dublin Core XML structures when requested by the harvester.
Two stylesheets are provided because one is used by the other.
Other stylesheets may be added to this implementation to provide
data in other requested formats, but OAI specifications require
that all providers be capable of returning data in Dublin Core
in addition to whatever other formats they support.
- Set1/*.xml
- Set2/*.xml
- These are sample object descriptive metadata files.
All code provided in this illustrative implementation is being made available
under OpenSource license.
AUTHORS:
- Thomas G. Habing
- Research Programmer, Digital Library Initiative
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
052 Grainger Engineering Library, MC-274
thabing@uiuc.edu
- Timothy W. Cole
- Mathematics Librarian
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
214 Altgeld Hall, MC-382
t-cole3@uiuc.edu
- John Lewis
- Visiting Research Programmer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
052 Grainger Engineering Library, MC-274
jslewis@uiuc.edu
- Ying-ping Chen
- Graduate Assistant
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
052 Grainger Engineering Library, MC-274
ychen21@uiuc.edu
- Joanne Kaczmarek
- Project Coordinator
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
052 Grainger Engineering Library, MC-274
jkaczmar@uiuc.edu
