Mirroring DSpace holdings in WordPress?

[Binkley, Peter]

If you do end up building this yourself, you might look to Scriblio for a model of syncing an external source of metadata (in that case an OPAC) into Wordpress: http://scriblio.net/ .

 

Peter

 

From: Web technologies in libraries [mailto:WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Prentiss Riddle
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2012 9:29 AM
To: WEB4LIB at LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Mirroring DSpace holdings in WordPress?

 

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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