[Dspace-general] Re: Best practice - serials and periodicals?

[Scott Yeadon]

Gaelle,

This is a slightly tricky one which we'll be facing soon...our current thoughts are to store each article as an item (as per your first option below), including introduction, appendices etc as an item in that collection. The table of contents and the relationships between each article will probably be expressed either through the metadata or more likely an XML file (possibly RDF) which can be used to tie the separate items together and processed (probably via Cocoon in our case) to build the journal from its DSpace components.

One thing that's worth keeping in mind is if you store an aggregate item (e.g. a PDF version of the serial) then it may be harder in the future to use individual articles in a different way, provide fine-grained discovery and citation (esp. handle cites) or produce other formats. If you split the publication in the first place into its component parts and keep them in a useful format (such as XML) then hopefully in the future migration and accessibility options are improved. Naturally this is easier said than done!

We take the view that going from granular to general (e.g. a collection of articles to a journal) will always be possible, however the other way (e.g. separating a journal into its components years down the track) may in fact be impossible in some instances (without significant manual effort anyway), so how to archive these materials is a really important decision.

We have done a proof of concept (the code I think is dowloadable from http://sts.anu.edu.au/drs/downloads/index.php), and hopefully will get the opportunity to implement a "real " project based on this idea before the end of the year.


Scott.


From: "Gaelle Bozec" <Gaelle.Bozec at ub.uib.no>
To: <dspace-general at mit.edu>
Subject: [Dspace-general] Best practice - serials and periodicals?
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Hello,
Here at the Bergen University Library (Norway), we are currently running DSpace v1.2.

I was wondering what is the usual practice for those of you having registred serials and periodicals in DSpace. 

- Do you register each volume as a collection and then each article as a single item in the defined collection? (Here I have a problem for the table of contents and the introduction of the volume). My choice was to give the file the name of the author and the file description is the title of the article...

- Do you register the serial as a collection? Then each item is a volume of the serial? In that case the item consists of several files (one file for one author, rigth?). Retriving the author is then a problem since I am not able to view a list of authors (the same with titles).

In one case, it's not easy to identify authors (because none are registred as authors) and in another case I'm not sure how I can best show each volume.


I'm not sure I'm clear here but hope that someone had the same thougths once and can share ideas and reflexions.

Best regards from Norway

Gaëlle Bozec
Bergen University Library, Norway

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