Mirroring DSpace holdings in WordPress?

[Prentiss Riddle]

Has anyone heard of a site which successfully mirrors or syndicates content
from a DSpace repository into a WordPress CMS?

The situation: I have undertaken a project to load my unit's electronic
publications into our university's DSpace repository. In addition I want to
offer access to the same resources through our WordPress site, in order to
give users a more uniform experience and to make our publications show up
in WordPress searches. I also expect some SEO benefits from making our
publications visible in both places. I envision mirroring the publications'
metadata in WordPress but leaving the full-text resources in DSpace.

So the short version of my question is: has anyone done this?



More detail for those who are interested:

I'm a DSpace newb but fairly experienced with WordPress.

I've looked for WordPress plugins or other tools to accomplish this task,
and the closest thing I can find is the FeedWordPress plugin to syndicate
Atom/RSS into WP, and the "XSL to Feeds" plugin to transform XML into
Atom/RSS. Since the latter is at version 0.1 and FeedWordPress is currently
reported broken for WP 3.3.1, I'm not very confident in this approach.

I've also thought about a "live" gateway from WP to DSpace to perform
DSpace queries on demand, which would have the advantage of avoiding synch
problems between DSpace and WordPress. But that hits the snags of (1)
performance and (2) I haven't seen any existing way to make WordPress
incorporate external search results in its own results. Nor have I found
the appropriate DSpace search API, but I confess I haven't looked.

The approach I'm falling back to is to write my own WordPress plugin to
ingest feeds from DSpace in one of the available formats (oai_dc, Atom,
RDF, DIM or METS). Of these, DIM seems to be the most complete and
furthermore disambiguates the publication date from the date of submission
to the repository (unfortunately OAI-PMH oai_dc just shows both as
"dc.date").

I might also add some administrative tools to look for synchronization
issues.

Some views of our DSpace community to date:

Web http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/14283

OAI-PMH oai_dc
http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/oai/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&set=hdl_2152_14283

DIM
http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/oai/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=dim&set=hdl_2152_14283


If you've read this far, more specific questions:

- Are there approaches I've overlooked?

- Is this basic idea sound? Am I nuts to mirror DSpace? Will the synch
issues drive me crazy?

- Is DIM the right choice for DSpace export? For some reason the Atom feed
omits dc.description and, as I said above, OAI-PMH oai_dc presents several
ambiguous versions of dc.date.

- Are the standard PHP XML functions up to the job of parsing an XML dump
of hundreds of DSpace records? If not, what alternatives are there?

- Is there anyplace else where I should be asking these questions?

Thanks!


Prentiss Riddle
IC² Institute, The University of Texas at Austin
2815 San Gabriel St., Austin, Texas 78705 USA

priddle at ic2.utexas.edu
office: +1-512-475-8970  mobile: +1-512-695-7371  Skype: pzriddle
AIM: pztejas   GTalk: prentiss.riddle   Yahoo IM: pzriddle

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2012-02-27
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