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The The China Digital Museum Project
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Another challenge that this project faces is how, given the vast diversity of these digital museums across China, to consolidate the digital assets that they each manage so that users do not have to know where are the assets are being stored in which website, but rather find and search them on by subject, such as "Chinese Calligraphy Paintings". Hence we aim to create "Virtual Museums", formed by arrangements of digital assets by subject, regardless of physical location.
Approach
The target solution is a large-scale, federated deployment of DSpace to serve the Chinese universities' digital museums and end users:
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- Keep track of DSpaces in the federation
- Allow those DSpaces to discover other DSpaces in the federation
- Provide a 'select mirror' tool when accessing objects
Status
Single university museum DSpace and data centre up and running and sharing content.
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- Chinese language translation of user interface. Almost complete.
- (./) Search of Chinese metadata and text. Complete, patch available also allowing plug-in of different Lucene Analysers
- OAI-PMH harvester/client - Build on existing client from Old Dominion University and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
- Supporting extended metadata - "Pretend" its Dublin Core to start; build on metadata support extension proposed by HP Labs, developed by Martin Hald at Eduworks (patch available, currently in beta)
- METS Importer tool - in prototype
- (./) Create Handles using remote Handle Server - patch available – fixing a scaling problem – Handles need to be created in batches
- (./) Configurable item display page. complete, in DSpace 1.3.2
Other tools
For testing DSpace at large scale, a large data set is needed. A quick way to fake one is to import the same data set several times over. However, you really need at least the titles to be different for each item.
The following modified (basic, non-METS) item importer slightly morphs metadata on the way in, so that each time it's run, you'll get a slightly altered set of items. Right now, it just adds increasing numbers to the titles, but the technique could be adapted for more sophisticated morphing if needed.