Kura compound record pilot project — May 2023
Posted on 05 May 2023 by Tim
Auckland Council Libraries Kura Heritage Collections Online is a fantastic resource that we are very proud to be able to share via the DigitalNZ website.
Some of the records on the Kura site are compound records — that is they have one record that describes an object (a two-page letter, for example), and additional records for each image (page) of the letter. This displays beautifully on Kura (see image below), with all the records working together to provide access to the metadata, the images, and also the ability to page through the document.
Image: Letter to Governor Grey from Ihaia Porutu, page 1 of 2. Visitors can easily move through the images on Kura.
However, DigitalNZ does not have the ability to manage and display compound records, and even if we did, the OAI-PMH feed we receive from Kura's content management system, ContentDM, does not preserve the relationships between the records that make up a compound record.
This means that when DigitalNZ harvests a compound record we create a single record with a title and description but no image, and a number of records with images but no metadata. We've been working on a better way of handling Kura compound records and have recently come up with a solution that works for us, for Kura, and most importantly — for our users.
This involves automatically identifying and not including image-only records in the harvesting process. Only one record is harvested — with a title, description, and a link back to Kura. However, we were keen to also include an image to add context and visual appeal. To solve this issue, our harvesting tool Supplejack takes another step — visiting the Kura website to find and attach an image to the metadata rich record on DigitalNZ.
Image: Letter to Governor Grey from Ihaia Porutu as seen on DigitalNZ. Visitors can now see an image on this record page.
So now we have Kura records that are content rich, have images, and link to Kura Heritage Collections Online for users who wish to view the full document. A win for all involved. So far we have only applied this fix to Kura manuscripts but have plans to extend it to journals and rare books.
We've turned off comments here, but we'd still love to know your thoughts. Visit us on our Facebook Page @digitalnz or on Twitter @DigitalNZ to share any ideas or musings with the DigitalNZ team.