[Dspace-general] Simple use case of DSpace -- can this work?

[Sergio Trejo]

Hello All,

I am about to install DSpace 1.4 alpha. I will gladly test it out and be
happy to provide feedback to the maintainers. I had started to look at
DSpace last year but was called to do work on a different project. Now I am
returning to DSpace and I am looking forward to it!.

I have a simple use case:

* I have, on the file system of the server which I plan to install DSpace
(Mac OS X Server), a top-level directory. This top-level directory contains
files, sub-directories, and a few symbolic links (the links are to other
directories within the top-level directory). The files contained in this
directory structure on the file system are comprised mostly of web-related
content (images in JPG and PNG), text, CSS, XHTML, etc. I also have one and
only one RDF file for the entire top-level directory which contains Simple
Dublin Core (15 elements maximum) that describe the entire directory of the
content I just mentioned (DC: author, date, identifier, publisher, etc.).

* I want to turn the above-described directory (and all of its content and
RDF metdata file and sub-directories) as a DSpace "item" (a DSpace archival
atom) as per the gorgeous diagram found at
http://www.dspace.org/introduction/dspace-diagram.pdf

* I would like to write a shell script that may be run on the Mac OS X
Server machine that is also hosting the DSpace 1.4 alpha system, which
script would be run by a designated Collection Curator and used to
importthe above-mentioned DSpace item. I would thus like to avoid or
highly
minimize the requirement for a person (curator) to use the DSpace Web
Interface and to avoid the need to fill out web forms for manually entering
metadata about the "item". The motto I must take in my small and lean
organization is borrowed from the Ruby on Rails community which espouses
simplicity and agile approaches: DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) <
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/DRY >

Looking at the DSpace documentation, it is my understanding that in order to
import an "item" into a DSpace repository, I will need to somehow create a
SIP (Submission Information Package) file. A SIP apparently is "an XML
metadata document with some content files" but I am having a hard time
finding detailed documentation on how to create a SIP and just what goes
into this "XML metadata document" as well as what "content files" are
required.

Could my proposed shell shell script, for example, parse the Simple Dublin
Core contained in the RDF document that both describes the and is a part of
the item, to generate a machine-meaningful SIP? How complex of a process
might this be, to create a SIP? Will I need more than Simple Dublin Core to
achieve all of this? Has anyone done something similar? My goal is to try
and keep things as easy on people as possible. It is my job to make other
people's lives as easy as possible ... I am fluent in scripting languages
(python works great as does ruby) and am looking forward to creating SIPs
for items.

Thank you for any suggestions.

-Sergio
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