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IssueLab's Record Loader Script

We've created an open source PHP script that is meant to compliment the University of Michigan's OAI data provider software, part of the UMich OAI Toolkit.

Our add-on, written in PHP v.5 to work with a MySQL database (tested on a Linux server running MySQL version 5.0.45), does the following:

1. takes the data saved in your MySQL database that you want to use to create OAI-PMH compliant metadata records;
2. converts that data into the required OAI XML schema;
3. creates XML records on the server out of the conversion that took place in step 2;
4. saves the XML records to your MySQL database in the mediumblob format (required by UMich's toolkit), and;
5. deletes the XML records (no longer needed since they now "live" in your database).

Everything you need for the Record Loader including detailed installation instructions (see the readme.txt file) are available to download here:

Download record_loader.zip

Important note: UMich's OAI toolkit includes set-up info for an "oaisets" table which works with the "ListSets" verb. Our script doesn't handle creating/updating records for this table because Set data will be unique for each data provider. For instance, IssueLab provides a Set for each of the issue areas we cover and so our version of the add-on script includes a routine to hunt through all of our records and then update the oaisets table. We can do that because we know our data structure. But we can't know everybody elses'! So please feel free to write your own function/routine and modify our files as needed to accomodate your Set data. If you come up with something good - share it!

Oooh, that last bit creates a nice segue to let you know... Our Record Loader script is available to anyone who wants it under the GNU General Public License and is Free Software. Complete info is available here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons GNU General Public License License.