Linda Octa

I just completed my assignment on adding plugin for METS and MODS export in Open Journal System. I am glad that designing a plugin for Open Journal System is not very difficult as the whole OJS is very modular. Going through the structure of OJS in detail, OJS actually has a lot of duplication of data and files. When trying to map which data from database can be used to generate METS and MODS, I am not sure which metadata attached to the article should I use.
When an author submit his article, the article file itself being duplicated for review, copyeditor as well as publication. The name of the file being changed but the actual file contents are the same. If OJS being implemented in big education organization, the disk space will be full in a very sort period of time. But maybe OJS has its own reason to do such duplication.

METS and MODS is a standard format for digital library or self-archive systems to exchanges their metadata. When I attended ICE workshop, we are trying to implement MODS in ICE as well as Fedora System. This workshop motivate me to choose this topic for my assignment and being implemented in OJS. I managed to create two different METS format, which one of them Fedora format and another one is a standard format. Fedora implements METS, but must based on its requirement. I am glad I completed my plugin and able to export a METS XML file and to be imported successfully by Fedora.

On top of the plugin, I also implement Personal Library System to import both Fedora METS and OJS METS. This system will show the imported METS file structure. All the metadata transferred through METS are stored in database.

Link to online System:
http://www.lindaocta.com/linda/WebManagement/

For the past 3 days, we are having a workshop to have ICE documents to be used for other repositories like Fedora. Three Universities like University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology and Australia National University participates in this workshop. Individual representatives for Open Journal System participate as well.

In USQ science Department, the Open Journal System, –link: http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/projects/dissertations/index.php/MSC/login –, is used for us, Master and PHD student to submit our proposal, seminars or thesis. This OJS provides the process from submission, proff reading, review and publish the journal.

ICE has e-Researcher that work the same as the OJS with extra advantages of having a nice template and subversion repositories to control the changes of the documents. Reviewer can just login to the repository through ICE and update the content of the document submitted by the researcher. As ICE doesn’t have the process like OJS except submission, OJS playing part to handle the rest of the process. In this workshop, we add additional metadata generator in ICE to generate MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) to be injected to OJS. So when OJS generate ICE document through ICE, all the metadata like TItle, Authors’ name (given, family and display name), affiliation , abstract and keyword will be generated and to be used in OJS.

UQ Library is also trying to import ICE document in their Fedora repository and maintain all the metadata generated for ICE document. This is a good metadata approach for searching those published papers that are generated from ICE. We are trying to add another METS xml document to provide more detail and complex hierarchical structure for the digital object in the library for ICE documents (“work-in-progress ”).

So how ICE generates this metadata?

As we have our complex XHTML conversion process from odt document, all we need to do is adding extra style in our ICE template. Currently we only support paragraph style for this metadata. So when the users wants to add those metadata, they can just select part of their document and apply style to it. Those new style are

p-meta-author

,

p-meta-affiliation

,

p-meta-abstract

and

p-meta-keyword

. Title will use current style which we called it ”

Title

“. After the user assigned the metadata to their document based on the style, e.g. pick up the author name and assign

p-meta-author

style, all the process of generating metadata will be done in during the process of rendering the odt document to XHTML.

We use elementtree, python package, to generate xml file. One inconsistencies that we found in elementtree is that installation path for different python version and OS version are not the same. But this issues are solved by using try and except method:

[html]
try:
    from xml.etree import ElementTree as ElementTree   #python 2.5
except ImportError:
    try:
        import ElementTree as ElementTree   #python 2.4
    except ImportError:
        from elementtree import ElementTree   #Mac OS python 2.4

Conclusion:
We are satisfied with the workshop by work out those task to be done in the next few weeks — Generating better MODS and METS file — so the metadata interoperability issue can be solved throughout different repositoirs.