LIBSAFE Configuration

A guide for LIBSAFE Advanced to OpenAccess publication

Step One: Organize the content for discovery

The discovery platform OA allows you to share content with users both inside and outside your organisation. Like in Go, the viewing of published objects can be restricted depending on users’ permissions - as OA also allows the creation of different accounts, as well as being available to browse as an anonymous user.

The multiple discovery options require your content to be well structured and organised before being published, as the OA users would not have access to internal structures like nodes and containers. It is, ultimately, an online museum-like platform where users can navigate through different publications and obtain information from the metadata available to them. Therefore, contextualising and making sense of the published objects and collections intended for discovery is paramount for the end-user experience and best understanding of the material.

Some organisations might find it easier to duplicate in Go the material they want to display in OA and apply the OA metadata only to the OA objects. While this is possible, it is not the recommended approach. A good structure and organisation, to begin with, will help to both be more time-efficient when handling archival structures, and use the total storage available in a sensible manner.

Step Two: Configuring the metadata schema

The key for the OA object in the preservation area being visible on the discovery platform lies within the metadata applied to said object. This is the information the transfer will use to determine whether an object is published or not, as well if it belongs to a particular collection and other specifications. A template for the OpenAccess metadata schema can be found in Configuration/Object Metadata/Metadata once the Transfer Connector is set up. It consists of six descriptors that should be either replicated in a pre-existing object metadata schema or applied as a schema on its own (if chosen the latter, no additional metadata would be displayed in the discovery platform, leaving the information area below the content empty).

1. OpenAccess Name: the name of the record in OpenAccess will be determined by the value input in this field

2. OpenAccess Profile: this section determines the type of viewer the discovery platform will use for the media displayed. Custom profiles can be created depending on the type of material showcased (i.e., a custom Sanskrit transcriptor profile has been implemented in one of the platforms). The options by default are:

   • 1 - Image

   • 2.1 - Audio

   • 2.2 - Audio + transcripts + image

   • 3.1 - Video

   • 3.2 - Video + transcripts + image

   • 3.3 - Video (mp4)

   • 4.1 - Documents/PDF

   • 4.2 - PDF (normalized)

   • 4.3 - Plain text

   • 5 - 3D

3. OpenAccess Collection: the object will be published under a previously defined collection (see Collections)

4. OpenAccess Status: this is where the user can select to publish the object or remove it from the discovery platform (un-publish). There are three greyed-out unavailable options in this descriptor, which will be chosen by the transfer connector depending on the status of the object in OA (published, not published, and publication error)

5. OpenAccess Link: if the object has been published to OA, a link to its location will be stored in this field

6. OpenAccess Log: automatically creates a brief log stating the date and time of publication and/or errors if any

The above descriptors can be present in different schemas across the LIBSAFE platform as long as their IECodes are replicated exactly as depicted.

Step Three: Creating the OA objects

As mentioned before, for any object to be published in OA it has to be inside a folder, which is the entity receiving the specific OA metadata. This folder can contain four different types of files, which will be part of the final published object in OA. These are as follows:

• Content: these are the files forming the main display of our OA object. They can be one or more files, and all of them must share the same file extension. This is due to OA using the same previewer for all the files within an object (i.e., if the content is made of a jpg and an mp3 file but the previewer is defined as an image, the mp3 file will not display on the discovery platform)

• Attachment: any content you want to make downloadable through OA when the object is accessed. Unlike the content, this is not mandatory for every object, and for the transfer connector to publish the attachment in OA, the file formats have to be specified in the code (though all extensions are allowed). Alternatively, manual attachments can be added directly from the OA platform (see OA documentation)

• ALTO: this is an XML file that describes the layout of the content, creating references for further reference of the file through searches

• Manifest: this file is automatically generated through the transfer connector process, and allows the object to be visible in the preservation area

Step Four: Publication in OpenAccess

Once the metadata has been configured and applied to the OA object, the content is visible in the discovery platform. This action might take a few minutes before the content can be accessed through the viewer. If any errors arise, they will be registered in the OA log metadata descriptor.