OAI-PMH Harvest

28th April 2014 (2014-04-28)

Contents

• Description
• Author(s)
• Latest Version
• Documentation
• Requirements / Dependencies
• Installation
• Bugs, Feature requests etc.
• Copyright And Licensing
• Examples

Description

A harvester to collect records from an OAI-PMH enabled provider.

The harvester can be used to carry out one-time harvesting of all records from a particular OAI-PMH provider by giving its base URL. It can also be used for selective harvesting, e.g. to harvest only records updated after, or before specified dates.

To assist in regular harvesting from one or more OAI-PMH providers, there's a provider registry. It is possible to associate a short memorable name for a provider with its base URLs, destination directory for harvested records, and the format (metadataPrefix) in which records should be harvested. The registry will also record the date and time of the most recent harvest, and automatically add this to subsequent requests in order to avoid repeatedly harvesting unmodified records.

This could be used in conjunction with a scheduler (e.g. CRON) to maintain a reasonably up-to-date copy of the record in one or more providers. Examples of how to accomplish these tasks are available below.

Author(s)

John Harrison <[email protected]> at the University of Liverpool

Latest Version

The latest release version is available in the Python Packages Index:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/oaiharvest

Source code is under version control and available from:

http://github.com/bloomonkey/oai-harvest

Documentation

All executable commands are self documenting, i.e. you can get help on how to use them with the -h or --help option.

At this time the only additional documentation that exists can be found in this README file!

Requirements / Dependencies

• Python >= 2.6
• pyoai
• lxml
• sqlite3

Installation

Users

pip install git+http://github.com/bloomonkey/oai-harvest.git#egg=oaiharvest

Developers

I recommend that you use virtualenv to isolate your development environment from system Python and any packages that may be installed there.

1. In GitHub, fork the repository

2. Clone your fork:

   git clone [email protected]:<username>/oai-harvest.git
   

3. Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

4. Install in develop / editable mode:

   pip install -e .
   

Bugs, Feature requests etc.

Bug reports and feature requests can be submitted to the GitHub issue tracker: http://github.com/bloomonkey/oai-harvest/issues

If you'd like to contribute code, patches etc. please email the author, or submit a pull request on GitHub.

Copyright And Licensing

Copyright (c) University of Liverpool, 2013-2014

See LICENSE.rst for licensing details.

Examples

Harvesting records from an OAI-PMH provider URL

All records

oai-harvest http://example.com/oai

Records modified since a certain date

oai-harvest --from 2013-01-01 http://example.com/oai

Records from a named set

oai-harvest --set "some:set" http://example.com/oai

Limiting the number of records to harvest

oai-harvest --limit 50 http://example.com/oai

Getting help on all available options

oai-harvest --help

OAI-PMH Provider Registry

Adding a provider

oai-reg add provider1 http://example.com/oai/1

If you don't supply --metadataPrefix and --directory options, you will be interactively prompted to supply alternatives, or accept the defaults.

Removing an existing provider

oai-reg rm provider1 [provider2]

Listing existing providers

oai-reg list

Harvesting from OAI-PMH providers in the registry

You can harvest from one or more providers in the registry using the short names that they were registered with:

oai-harvest provider1 [provider2]

By default, this will harvest all records modified since the last harvest from each provider. You can over-ride this behavior using the --from and --until options.

You can also harvest from all providers in the registry:

oai-harvest all

Scheduling Regular Harvesting

In order to maintain a reasonably up-to-date copy of all the the records held by those providers, one could configure a scheduler to periodically harvest from all registered providers. e.g. to tell CRON to harvest all at 2am every day, one might add the following to crontab:

0 2 * * * oai-harvest all