Metadata Reporter

Script to report on various aspects of metadata retrieved via OAI-PMH. Currently in early, proof-of-concept development. Inspired by the CONTENTdm Collection Inspector.

System requirements and installation

To install and run this script, you will need:

• PHP 5.5.0 or higher command-line interface
• Composer

To install the reporter:

• Clone the Git repo
• cd metadata_reporter
• php composer.phar install (or equivalent on your system, e.g., ./composer install)

Usage

Run ./reporter test.ini, where 'test.ini' specifies whether or not to save the records to disk, an output directory, an OAI-PMH entpoint, a setSpec, and a list of reports:

[general]
# save_records defaults to true
save_records = false
# output_dir defaults to records

[oai]
endpoint = http://digital.lib.sfu.ca/oai2
# set_spec defaults to none
set_spec = hiv_collection
# metadata_prefix and namespace default to oai_dc and http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/

[reports]
reports[] = element_count
reports[] = unique_element_values
# Defaults to unique_element_values_output_file.txt
unique_element_values_output_file = element_values.txt

The reports

Currently, only two reports are availalbe, 'element_count' and 'unique_element_values'.

element_count

This report lists all the elements used in the aggregated metadata harvested from the OAI endpoint. Its purpose is to provide an overview of which elements are repeated, and which are absent from the metadata. The reporter script prints a brief list of element names along with the total number of instances of the element, like this:

Element Number occurances in all records
========================================
dc:title    73
dc:description  73
dc:date 73
dc:type 146
dc:identifier   292
dc:rights   73

unique_element_values

This report lists all of the elements used in the aggregated metadata harvested from the OAI endpoint, and for each element, a list a all the unique values used in that element. Its purpose is to provide an overview of how consistent the values are, or if there are any empty elements (signified with an empty string, "", in the list of values). If you configure the 'unique_element_values' report to run, its output will be in the file located in your .ini file's [reports][unique_element_values_output_file] setting. The file will contain a section for each metadata element used in the set of metadata records, accompanied by a list of unique values in that element. Sample output (showing only three Dublin Core elements for brevity) looks like this:

dc:date
========================
""
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000

dc:type
========================
StillImage
postage stamps

dc:rights
========================
Reproduction of the material is subject to the approval of the Special Collections and Rare Books Librarian

Note that when applied to hierarchical XML formats like MODS, the 'unique_element_values' shows the text values for elements and all child elements. For example, for the MODS snippet <titleInfo><title>I am a title</title></titleInfo>, the report will include "I am a title" in the entry for both <titleInfo> and <title>, because <title> is a child of <titleInfo>. This is probably not the desired behavior.

To do

• Test with OAI-PMH metadata formats other than oai_dc (tested with DC and MODS).
• Add a report that shows which elements have which attributes, plus the unique attribute values.
• Provide an option to display the XPath to the elements.
• Break our report generators into plugins.
• Allow reports to be formatted using Twig templates.

License

To the extent possible under law, Mark Jordan has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work. This work is published from Canada.

Contributing

If you have any questions or suggestions, open an issue.