All,

I'm playing around with the OAI Harvesting functionality (DS-289), in 
particular creating a Collection that harvests its items from an 
external OAI-PMH interface.

It all seems to work wonderfully, however I'm concerned about the lack 
of visible "provenance" information for harvested items.  Harvested 
items are in a "harvested_item" lookup table in the database, but in the 
DSpace UI they look identical to normal items.  In other words, there is 
no discernible way (that I can find) for a DSpace Administrator to know 
from the UI if an item has been harvested from another location.

One way to let a DSpace Administrator know where this item came from is 
to record some basic human-readable text in the 
"dc.description.provenance" field (similar to how we record submitter 
info in that field for normal item).

(Side note: I realize that 'dc.description.provenance' is not the best 
way to store our provenance metadata longterm.  But, that's a much 
larger discussion we need to have after 1.6)

I'm wondering if at a bare minimum we should change the OAI Harvester to 
enter in a 'dc.description.provenance' line for Harvested Items that 
says something similar to:

"Item harvested via OAI from [original location] on [date]".

This would at least give DSpace Administrators a better understanding of 
the provenance of this item.

I'd like to propose making this small change in 1.6.0, so that we at 
least capture some minimal provenance for these harvested items.

Does anyone have any objections to this minor change?  Or other comments 
about this proposal?

- Tim

-- 
Tim Donohue
Technical Lead for DSpace Project
DuraSpace.org

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