National Aggregator Pilot Project

The aim of the pilot project is to create a shared and standards-based online portal, which will allow for searching content of digital repositories from across contributing institutions. The site should expose the indexed metadata, and link back to the respective holding institution for full-text access, leaving each participating institution in full control over their repositories. The participating institutions are the Wits Research Archives/Historical Papers, the Wits Library, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and The African Rock Art Digital Archive.

Considering the content owners (libraries, archives, museums, and galleries) and the varied description standards used, the project aims to accommodate institutions, which have already implemented digital repositories such as AtoM (Access to Memory) as the primary application, as well as any other OAI compliant repositories, such as DSpace. OAI-MHP Compliance is a prerequisite for participation (Open Access Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol) in the pilot aggregator. With these requirements of the project, and the differing standards involved, the Wits-NRF Initiative recommended that the EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) solution be used in order to implement the pilot aggregator. The EBSCO Discovery Service can harvest metadata from OAI-compliant repositories and display these items as search results from across contributing repositories. As the solution is easily transferable, it can accommodate various metadata standards and has produced a similar project in Australia. EDS will index exposed metadata from the participating repositories, and create a searchable index. Users can conduct their search from the portal website, and results will deliver the metadata and allow linking back to the hosting repository or institution for full-text access. This solution would allow hosting and technical requirements to be kept to a minimum and provide a fully supported web service, which could be sustainable in the future.