Harvesting assets from OAI-PMH sites

Portfolio lets you harvest assets from OAI-PMH compliant sites and add the metadata to your repository. While the assets are not harvested from the sites, your patrons can search your repository and find these asset records. The results will refer them to the site from which the metadata was harvested. If the OAI-PMH provider included a URL for the asset in the metadata, that can be included as a link in the item details.

	Run OAI-PMH harvests at a time when other administrators are not likely to be making changes to the asset hierarchy or importing multiple assets. If someone makes a change to the hierarchy during an OAI-PMH harvest, the harvester may abort during the process.

In your repository, OAI-PMH assets are originally kept in special folders that signify that the contents are from an outside source and that updates may alter the content and metadata of the assets. After the initial harvest, you can either run an update harvest to import any modifications that the provider may have made to the metadata, or you can do a full harvest, which replaces all of the previously harvested metadata with the most current metadata from the provider site.

Because of the way that harvests are done, OAI-PMH metadata is stored in a special OAI-PMH folder in your repository. The assets can be published, moved, and linked like any other asset; however, when you do a full harvest, the contents of the OAI-PMH folder is replaced with the most current information from the provider’s repository. Any changes you may have made to the hierarchy in the folder will be lost while items you deleted will be restored.

	Portfolio supports the oai-dc metadata format. For more information about OAI-PMH formats, see http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.htm#MetadataFormats.

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