Some results on XML processing in the CIC metadata harvesting project

Abstract

The CIC metadata harvesting project at the University of Illinois uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to collect descriptive metadata records from CIC member universities. These records are then reprocessed, normalized, and augmented before being re-offered to the UIUC and broader communities via the CIC metadata portal. As of 2005, approximately five hundred thousand records were available through this portal, which may be searched in a variety of ways through three different interfaces. Here we shall be concerned with the actual reprocessing of the metadata and more specifically with the underlying computational system necessary to facilitate this reprocessing.