How-To: Start Sending Us Paradata

To set up an OAI data provider for your paradata, the basic steps are:

1. Download the jOAI software
2. Install jOAI on a publicly accessible Tomcat server
3. Configure jOAI to look for your paradata records in a directory on
the file system
4. Write the paradata XML records to the directory, one record per
file


The details:

---- Installing jOAI: ----

jOAI is available for download from SourceForge:
http://www.dlese.org/dds/services/joai_software.jsp

Installation instructions:
http://www.dlese.org/oai/docs/INSTALL.txt

Once installed, follow these instructions to set up your data
provider:
http://www.dlese.org/oai/docs/provider.jsp

In step 3 of the data provider setup:
-Use 'comm_para' as the metadata format (metadtaPrefix). Leave the
metadata namespace and schema blank - we have not yet defined these.
-Choose a directory of files where you will be exporting your paradata
to. This must be available to the Tomcat server and to the CTE Online
middleware (assuming it will be doing the exporting...)

E-mail John Weatherly with the public URL of your OAI installation.

---- Writing the paradata XML records ----

For each resource that has relevant paradata, you'll write a single
paradata XML record to the directory indicated in the OAI data
provider setup. When paradata becomes available for a new resource,
create a new record. When paradata changes for an existing resource,
update the record with the new paradata. Ultimately you'll want to set
up a cron to automatically create and update the paradata at some
reasonable interval, say once a day, week, month. From there jOAI will
do the work to pass the paradata updates along to NSDL automatically
via OAI-PMH.

Paradata schema will be defined shortly...  Example records will be linked from this space on Thursday, Jan 13