BlacklightOaiProvider

OAI-PMH service endpoint for Blacklight applications

Description

The BlacklightOaiProvider plugin provides an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) data provider endpoint, using the ruby-oai gem. This endpoint enables service providers harvest a data provider's metadata.

Versioning

Starting v4.1 major plugin versions are synced with major Blacklight versions. The last known version to work with Blacklight 3.x/Rails 3.x is v0.1.0.

A few maintenance branches have been left in place in case there is interest to add support for older versions of Rails/Blacklight:

v3.x -> Support for Blacklight 3.0

v4.x -> Support for Blacklight 4.0 and Rails 3.0

Requirements

A Rails app running Rails 4.x and Blacklight 4.x.

OAI-PMH requires a timestamp field for all records. The Solr index should include an appropriate field. This field should be able to support date range queries. By default, the name of this field is timestamp (more on how to configure this below).

A properly configured documentHandler in the blacklight/solr configuration.

Installation

Add

    gem 'blacklight_oai_provider'

to your Gemfile and run bundle install.

Then run

rails generate blacklight_oai_provider:install

to install the appropriate extensions into your CatalogController class, SolrDocument class, and routes file. If you want to do customize the way this installs, instead you may:

• add this to the SolrDocument model:

include BlacklightOaiProvider::SolrDocument

• add this to the Controller:

include BlacklightOaiProvider::Controller

• add this to config/routes.rb

  concern :oai_provider, BlacklightOaiProvider::Routes.new

  resource :catalog, only: [:index], as: 'catalog', path: '/catalog', controller: 'catalog' do
    concerns :oai_provider
    ...
  end

Configuration

While the plugin provides some sensible (albeit generic) defaults out of the box, you probably will want to customize the OAI provider configuration.

Blacklight configuration

You can provide OAI-PMH provider parameters by placing the following in your blacklight configuration (most likely in app/controllers/catalog_controller.rb)

configure_blacklight do |config|

  # ...

  config.oai = {
    provider: {
      repository_name: 'Test',
      repository_url: 'http://localhost/catalog/oai',
      record_prefix: 'oai:test',
      admin_email: 'root@localhost',
      sample_id: '109660'
    },
    document: {
      limit: 25,            # number of records returned with each request, default: 15
      set_fields: [        # ability to define ListSets, optional, default: nil
        { label: 'language', solr_field: 'language_facet' }
      ]
    }
  }

  # ...
end

The "provider" configuration is documented as part of the ruby-oai gem at http://oai.rubyforge.org/

A basic set model is included that maps Solr fields to OAI sets. Provide set_fields with an array of hashes defining the solr_field, and optionally a label and description. The configuration above will cause the ListSets verb to query Solr for unique values of the language_facet field and present each value as a set using a spec format of language:value. When the set parameter is supplied to the ListRecords verb, it will append a filter to the Solr query of the form fq=language_facet:value. If no label is provided, the set will use the solr_field name. To customize the ListSet implementation, see customizing listsets.

Note: The document handler in your blacklight controller must be configured properly for this plugin to correctly look up records.

SolrDocument configuration

To change the name of the timestamp solr field in your SolrDocument model change the following attribute:

self.timestamp_key = 'record_creation_date' # Default: 'timestamp'

The metadata displayed in the xml serialization of each record is based off the field_semantics hash in the SolrDocument model. To update/change these fields add something like the following to your model:

  field_semantics.merge!(
    creator: "author_display",
    date: "pub_date",
    subject: "subject_topic_facet",
    title: "title_display",
    language: "language_facet",
    format: "format"
  )

The fields used by the dublin core serialization are:

[:contributor, :coverage, :creator, :date, :description, :format, :identifier, :language, :publisher, :relation, :rights, :source, :subject, :title, :type]

Customizing ListSets

In order to customize the default ListSets implementation, first create your own Sets class that subclasses BlacklightOaiProvider::Set or BlacklightOaiProvider::SolrSet and implement all required methods. Ex:

class NewListSet < BlacklightOaiProvider::SolrSet
  def description
    "This is a #{label} set containing records with the value of #{value}."
  end
end

Next, your SolrDocument model must override, sets, an instance method that returns an array of sets for each document. Ex:

def sets
  NewListSet.sets_for(self)
end

Finally, you can substitute you own Set model using the set_model option.

config.oai = {
  document: {
    set_model: NewListSet,
    set_fields: [
      { label: 'language', solr_field: 'language_facet' }
    ]
  }
}

Tests

We use engine_cart and solr_wrapper to run tests on a dummy instance of an app using this plugin.

To run the entire test suite:

rake ci

You can test OAI-PMH conformance against http://www.openarchives.org/data/registerasprovider.html#Protocol_Conformance_Testing or browse the data at http://re.cs.uct.ac.za/