This page documents the new choice management and authority control of Item ("DC") metadata values features in DSpace 1.6.
These are actually two separate features: the choice management mechanism is completely independent of authority control and can be configured and deployed independently of it.
If you are wondering what authority control is and why it is important
please see Dorothea Salo's comprehensive paper, Name authority control in institutional repositories.
Note that this is a general mechanism for authority control of any metadata field:
Although author (and other personal) names are the most common (and most urgently needed) example, the prototype can be applied to any of the DC fields. It requires some minor, backward-compatible changes to the DSpace 1.5 data model and API. A prototype implementation is available for DSpace 1.6.
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Definitions
- Choice Management - This is a mechanism that generates a list of choices for a value to be entered in a given metadata field. Depending on your implementation, the exact choice list might be determined by a proposed value or query, or it could be a fixed list that is the same for every query. It may also be closed (limited to choices produced internally) or open, allowing the user-supplied query to be included as a choice.
- Authority Control - This works in addition to choice management to supply an authority key along with the chosen value, which is also assigned to the Item's metadata field entry. Any authority-controlled field is also inherently choice-controlled.
About Authority Control
The advantages we seek from an authority controlled metadata field are:
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Some Terminology
- Authority - An authority is a source of fixed values for a given domain, each unique value identified by a key.
For example, the OCLC LC Name Authority Service. - Authority Record - The information associated with one of the values in an authority; may include alternate spellings and equivalent forms of the value, etc.
- Authority Key - An opaque, hopefully persistent, identifier corresponding to exactly one record in the authority.
Choice Management: Design Principles and Behavior
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The available values are:
- lookup - User enters a proposed value and clicks a button to "look up" choices based on that value, and present a pop-up window that lets her navigate through choices.
- suggest - As the user types in a text-input field, a menu of suggested choices is automatically generated. It acts like the Google Suggest feature.
- select - Puts up a drop-down menu (or multi-pick selection box) of choices using the HTML SELECT widget. This style should only be used for plugins that have a relatively small, and fixed set of choices. It does not support authority values and should not be used for authority-controlled fields.
Authority Control: Design Principles and Behavior
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