Best Practices for Mapping Digital Commons Metadata for Harvesting by SHARE v.1.1 - Google Docs

"The goal of the SHARE initiative, a partnership between the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Center for Open Science (COS), is to build a “free, open, data set about research and scholarly activities across their life cycle.” As of June 26, 2017, 154 repositories and publishers have made metadata available to SHARE for harvesting, and the aggregated data set is available for searching. Many metadata providers are institutional repositories utilizing the bepress Digital Commons platform whose metadata is harvested through the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) protocol for repository interoperability.

It is easy to register your Digital Commons repository and become discoverable in SHARE. Complete the registration form at https://share.osf.io/registration. When you are prompted for your baseURL, provide your repository domain followed by do/oai, e.g., http://ir.uiowa.edu/do/oai.  Digital Commons repositories are already participating to help increase the exposure of their content. As part of the 2016-17 SHARE Curation Associates program, the authors, who are managers of Digital Commons repositories, began collaborating on a gap analysis of the metadata provided by their institutions and harvested by SHARE. Our goals are threefold: to improve institutional metadata curation processes; to provide good and consistent metadata to SHARE; and to develop workflows and recommendations for other Digital Commons institutions to apply.

This document details our findings and recommendations to improve the mapping of Digital Commons metadata to SHARE. It should be emphasized: these are neither requirements of SHARE nor barriers to participation. Our purpose is to gather community feedback from other institutional repositories and to provide bepress with clear recommendations on how their OAI could be enhanced."