Partners/Publishers

Question

Hello, We spotted your site in a new article. We have a library of 1.2 million science, medical and historical imagery. Could you send us some information on getting listed or instruct us how to?

Answer

The NSDL is very interested in having your material listed in our service athttp://nsdl.org. There are several methods by which we could incorporate your records in our catalog that I have listed below. Please contact me )John M. Saylor at 607-255-4134 or jms1@cornell.edu) directly if you would like to discuss in more detail. Records in the Library related to the content exist in the form, minimally, of simple Dublin Core metadata that describe and locate the full content. Additional metadata, in any of the non-Dublin Core, NSDL Standards of Interest (see NSDL metadata resources page:http://metamanagement.comm.nsdlib.org/IntroPage.html), or any structured, consistent native format, may also be submitted along with unqualified Dublin Core metadata. All metadata that comprise the NSDL resides in a central metadata repository. Transfer of metadata will proceed by means agreed upon by the supplier and NSDL. There a number of ways in which metadata may be incorporated in the metadata repository. In order of preference, these are A. Exposing metadata via OAI The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting http://www.openachives.org) allows projects with standard metadata (and sufficient technical support) to expose their metadata for harvesting by the NSDL on a regular schedule. It is the preferred method for bringing metadata in to the repository primarily because, when established, it requires very little manual intervention. NSDL staff can be of some assistance in setting up OAI servers, but projects should have adequate technical staff to manage and maintain a basic level of service. B. Sending metadata via ftp Projects using standard metadata but concerned about having insufficient technical staff to set up and maintain an OAI server may transfer metadata to NSDL using ftp. Because this method is more resource intensive than OAI, and generally requires NSDL staff time to manage, it should be considered a temporary, short-term expendient. In the long-term, as OAI out-of-the-box solutions become more available, most ftp arrangements will migrate to OAI. Projects with metadata not conforming to one of the eight formats considered "standard" for NSDL will need to provide detailed information about their metadata and be prepared to work with the NSDL staff to prepare a crosswalk from their data format to Dublin Core so that the metadata can be accepted for import into the NSDL Metadata Repository. C. Enabling metadata "scraping" NSDL will have tools available to automatically "scrape" websites for information that can be transformed into a metadata record. In some cases, this technique will be used in much the same way robots for search engines operate: without the knowledge or cooperation of the site itself. In most cases, particularly for important collections which have not yet created (or do not plan to create) metadata, cooperation will be sought and permission granted to "scrape" the site. One way that sites can actively participate in this process is by creating and inserting metadata directly on their web pages. This metadata can be transformed by the "scraper" software into an NSDL metadata record of much higher quality and usefulness than one created by the software tool on its own. NSDL staff recommends that sites use "DC-Dot," a tool developed in the UK, for this process, and will provide consulting assistance for sites wishing to go this route