The Code4Lib Journal – From Digital Commons to OCLC: A Tailored Approach for Harvesting and Transforming ETD Metadata into High-Quality Records

"The library literature contains many examples of automated and semi-automated approaches to harvest electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) metadata from institutional repositories (IR) to the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). However, most of these approaches could not be implemented with the institutional repository software Digital Commons because of various reasons including proprietary schema incompatibilities and high level programming expertise requirements our institution did not want to pursue. Only one semi-automated approach was found in the library literature which met our requirements for implementation, and even though it catered to the particular needs of the DSpace IR, it could be implemented to other IR software if further customizations were applied.

The following paper presents an extension of this semi-automated approach originally created by Deng and Reese, but customized and adapted to address the particular needs of the Digital Commons community and updated to integrate the latest Resource Description & Access (RDA) content standards for ETDs. Advantages and disadvantages of this workflow are discussed and presented as well."