Managing Primary Content with NSDL’s EduPak

This poster presents our research efforts to model, store, and retrieve primary content (e.g. images, documents) in EduPak, NSDL’s recently released open source package combining a digital repository, collection management system and search system. NSDL deploys an instance of EduPak as the operational library at www.nsdl.org, but it can also be downloaded and installed as a local repository solution.

In collaboration with the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries, we have developed an experimental Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) profile for packaging and transporting collections of metadata and primary (binary) content.  In addition to the experimental METS profile, we developed a process for ingesting the METS profile as an NDR collection that uses the NSDL data model of collection, metadata, aggregator, resource and metadata provider objects. The resource object is used to hold the primary content. This capability is now being used operationally by the NCAR Library to manage local collections of technical documents using EduPak.