JISC Information Environment Architecture Collection Description Service

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Introduction

The JISC IE Collection Description Service will provide information about the collections available within the JISC IE information environment. A collection is any discrete aggregation of one or more items of content, but will often take the form of a database of one kind or another. The primary intention of the service is to allow portals, brokers and aggregators to automatically determine what collections are available to end-users of the JISC IE.

Collection descriptions are concerned with the content of the collection rather than with the services that make the collection available. Collection descriptions will be closely related to the service descriptions held in the service description service.

Issues

Development of the JISC IE collection description service needs to consider the following areas:

• The metadata schema(s) needed to describe JISC IE collections. It is anticipated that the Dublin Core, the RSLP collection description schema or EAD/ISAD(G) will be used. It is anticipated that any proposed solution will be based on XML. Cataloguing guidelines for the creation of collection descriptions, in particular the areas of subject, audience level, resource type and certification in particular, will need to be considered.
• The (persistent) identification of JISC IE collections so that they can be referred to in other metadata (for example within service descriptions).
• The protocol(s) used to exchange collection descriptions between the collection description service and other JISC IE service components (portals, brokers and aggregators). It is anticipated that primary consideration will be given to the OAI Harvesting Protocol. It should be noted that some services to query the collection description service dynamically in real-time while others will operate in batch mode, caching collection descriptions locally or using them to create local configuration files on a regular, automated basis.
• Any business and service provision issues, including ownership of the collection descriptions, the maintenance of information held in the collection description service and the relationship between the collection description service and the service description service.
• The availability of software tools for interacting with the collection description service and processing descriptions.