[OAI-implementers] Aggregator question

Young,Jeff jyoung@oclc.org
Thu, 5 Dec 2002 09:48:17 -0500


We plan to harvest a mixture of OAI-PMH v2.0, 1.1 and possibly 1.0
repositories, aggregate the results, and provide OAI-PMH v2.0 access to the
new repository. To do this, it will be necessary to upgrade old oai_dc
metadata records to the 2.0 schemaLocation
(http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/
http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd).

According to section 2 of the  "Guidelines for Aggregators, Caches and
Proxies" (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-aggregator.htm)
"Agents which re-export harvested records should do so with different
identifiers unless the metadata is unaltered...." The question is, then,
does the change to a new schemaLocation constitute an alteration of the
metadata?

While I'm at it, I'm tempted to normalize the presence of xml namespace
prefixes. For example, some repositories use an implied namespace prefix,
some use oai_dc:dc, some use oaidc:dc, etc. Would this kind of change
constitute an alteration of the metadata?

Thanks.

Jeff

---
Jeffrey A. Young
Consulting Software Engineer
Office of Research, Mail Code 710
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
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