From the post:
Metadata! Metadata is very cool. It’s super hot right now – everybody is talking about it. Okay, maybe not everyone, but it’s an important part of archiving scholarly work.
We are working on a repo on GitHub
rmetadatato be a one stop shop for querying metadata from around the web. Various repos on GitHub we have started – rpmc, rdatacite, rdryad, rpensoft, rhindawi – will at least in part be folded intormetadata.As a start we are writing functions to hit any metadata services that use the OAI-PMH: “Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting” framework.
OAI-PMHhas six methods (or verbs as they are called) for data harvesting that are the same across different metadata providers:
GetRecordIdentifyListIdentifiersListMetadataFormatsListRecordsListSets
OAI-PMHprovides an updating list of data providers, which we can easily use to get the base URLs for their data. Then we just use one of the six above methods to query their metadata.
Re-using metadata is a lot easier than creating all new metadata.
Not to mention avoiding creating new metadata that is inconsistent with existing metadata.