[Dspace-general] Arabic Language Metadata

[Mathias Hjelt]

Andrew,

I recently posted a similar question on the dspace-tech list and the few answers I got made it clear that DSpace currently does not provide support for this, i.e. in the submission stage it's not possible to assign arbitrary language flags to metadata fields. DSpace always uses whatever default language is defined in dspace.cfg for all metadata entered by the user during the submission process.

One person kindly pointed out this patch for me: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1426556&group_id=19984&atid=319984 which would seem to do the job, but it's from 2006 so my guess is that it won't work with the latest DSpace release. Haven't yet had time to test it myself, though.

Currently I'm considering a workaround where I just put in repeatable fields (e.g. the submitting user can add an arbitrary number of alternate titles to a submission), which all initially end up being flagged as en_US, and then have the user or some Chief Metadata Cleanup Officer put in the proper language codes for the alternate titles after the submission is completed. It makes the submission workflow more complicated, but it gets the job done.

In the process of customising DSpace for our needs I've stumbled across a number of limitations related to handling of multiple languages. We need to raise enough interest in these issues so that necessary patches are submitted, tested and finally comitted into the mainstream DSpace release. It's a shame that there already was a patch, but that never got committed..

Best regards

Mathias Hjelt
HANKEN


-----Original Message-----
From: dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:dspace-general-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of Andrew Hankinson
Sent: 13. kesäkuuta 2007 21:49
To: dspace-general at mit.edu
Subject: [Dspace-general] Arabic Language Metadata

Hi folks,

I'm trying to customize Dspace to do Arabic language metadata.  We have a number of recordings of Arabic folk music that our researchers want to catalogue in English and Arabic.

>From what I can tell, the only problem (so far) would be that Dspace assumes all metadata submissions are in English. ('en') I have an idea that I would simply add a new entry to 'input-forms.xml' so that it would double each field i.e. English Author / Arabic Author, English Title / Arabic Title, etc.  However, I cannot seem to find the place where I can tell it that that particular field will be catalogued in Arabic.

Any thoughts?  Thanks in advance.

Andrew

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