Use case 4: Cross-searching metadata from institutional repositories
Many institutional repositories in the Higher Education sector in the UK are using item-level metadata schemas based on extended Dublin Core application profiles. Two such schemas are UKETD_DC: The metadata core set recommended by EThOS and Scholarly works application profile (SWAP), developed respectively by the JISC-funded Electronic Theses Online System (EThOS) and Eprints Application Profile projects. Although the UKETD_DC schema is intended for electronic theses and dissertations, it is being used by some repositories to describe other institutional research outputs such as journal papers and conference presentations, for which the SWAP schema is intended. The schemas are disjoint; for example, UKETD has the attribute "Sponsor" (a relator term) which is not present in SWAP. Dumbing-down both schemas to Dublin Core is lossy, and is not likely to support the functionality required for cross-search services such as that being developed for the JISC-funded Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland (IRIScotland) project. This is discussed in Draft IRIScotland metadata agreement: standards and guidelines for institutional repositories, a deliverable of the project (note that this document was updated as part of the JISC-funded extension to the project). An option for IRIScotland is to develop its own application profile, which would require mappings to UKETD and SWAP to support institutional contribution to other OAI-PMH communities. Using the extended RDA/ONIX Framework would improve sustainability and maintenance. Mappings to the Framework for publisher-generated metadata would also improve the ability of cross-search services to include published versions of theses, papers, conference proceedings and other scholarly research output, versions which are not necessarily identical copies of institutional versions.
SWAP is in active development by the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community , so the sustainability and maintenance of mappings to similar schemas is of current concern.