[Dspace-general] Using dc.relation as link to external file?

[Shane Beers]

I am a new DSpace administrator so forgive me if this is a common  
issue that has been discussed previously.

An individual at my university wishes to put some video files in our  
DSpace archive. This brings up a few issues such as how the user will  
view the files, what codecs to employ, etc. The initial issue,  
however, is that the individual wishes the video files to be able to  
be streamed from our university's streaming server. His initial idea  
was to store an html page within DSpace that linked to the video on  
our streaming server. I explained to him that this would be  
disconnecting the data described in the archive with the actual data  
itself, which essentially defeats the purpose of the archive. I  
suggested that perhaps storing the non-streaming file in the archive,  
and using the dc.relation field to link to the related streaming file  
would be the most elegant solution. He mentioned that he had run into  
issues typing in URLs into metadata fields in DSpace in the past, so  
I'm not sure if this is possible or not. Additionally, the relation  
field does not appear to be present in the submission page -- is this  
enabled by default, or do I have to add it to the submission page  
manually? I have inherited this archive from another individual so  
I'm not sure as to the extensiveness of the customizations that have  
taken place.

If anyone else has developed a good solution to a problem like this,  
feel free to let me know!

Thanks much.

Shane Beers
Digital Repository Services Librarian
George Mason University
sbeers at gmu.edu
703-993-3742



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