Taking Control of Library Metadata and Websites Using the eXtensible Catalog

  • Jennifer Bowen, University of Rochester, jbowen@library.rochester.edu

Code4Lib 2010 - Tuesday, February 23 - 13:00-13:20

The eXtensible Catalog Project has developed four open-source software toolkits that enable libraries to build and share their own web- and metadata-focused applications on top of a service-oriented architecture that incorporates Solr in Drupal, a robust metadata management platform, and OAI-PMH and NCIP-compatible tools that interact with legacy library systems in real-time.

XC’s robust metadata management platform allows libraries to orchestrate and sequence metadata processing services on large batches of metadata. Libraries can build their own services using the available “service-writers toolkit” or choose from our initial set of metadata services that clean up and “FRBRize” MARC metadata. Another service will aggregate metadata from multiple repositories to prepare it for use in unified discovery applications. XC software provides an RDA metadata test bed and a Solr-based metadata “navigator” that can aggregate and browse metadata (or data) in any XML format. XC’s user interface platform is the first suite of Drupal modules that treat both web content and library metadata as native Drupal nodes, allowing libraries to build web-applications that interact with metadata from library catalogs and institutional repositories as well as with library web pages. XC’s Drupal modules enable Solr in a FRBRized data environment, as a first step toward a full implementation of RDA. Other currently-available XC toolkits expose legacy ILS metadata, circulation, and patron functionality via web services for III, Voyager and Aleph (to date) using standard protocols (OAI-PMH and NCIP), allowing libraries to easily and regularly extract MARC data from an ILS in valid MARCXML and keep the metadata in their discovery applications “in sync” with source repositories.

This presentation will showcase XC’s metadata processing services, the metadata “navigator” and the Drupal user interface platform. The presentation will also describe how libraries and their developers can get started using and contributing to the XC code.

Presentation PDF