Widgetizing DSpace stalled by OAI-DC

We’ve been needing a widget for displaying citations from DSpace collections on departmental and customer web sites.  For example, our Center of Telemedicine and Telehealth wants to display all their citations grouped by year on their web site without having to manually update the web site.

It seemed simple enough.  My first thought was to pull an RSS feed from DSpace into Yahoo! Pipes or a similar service. Then I would deploy a javascript widget from there.

Problem #1: Ideally you don’t want your RSS feeds spouting 80 items starting back in the 1990’s.

Problem #2: By default, the data in the feeds isn’t rich enough.  I need journal, volume, issue, etc.

My next go at it was to use DSpace’s OAI-PMH provider. This makes more sense than RSS. The data is rich, it’s all there, and I can specify sets or date ranges using Collection handles.

So what’s the drawback? The default metadata format for OAI in DSpace is oai_dc, i.e. unqualified Dublin Core, making it nigh impossible to distinguish published date from deposited date and publication source from handle URI.  This would exponentially complicate my simple little Pipe and make my brain hurt…alot.

The solution? Apply a Metadata Crosswalk Plugin for exposing QDC in OAI.  DSpace 1.5 even includes a preliminary crosswalk for this.  One more reason to expedite moving to 1.5.x.  We’re almost there anyway.*

*We’re still running DSpace 1.4 in production which does have a crosswalk plugin implementation known as XSLT Crosswalk but I’d rather devote my time to the upgrade.