Metadata harvesting

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National metadata harvesting collaboration

Harvesting with edna is the process of gathering metadata records from education and training related websites and repositories and making  them accessible through edna's federated search.

edna has established a range of methods for maintaining, aggregating and exchanging metadata about online resources for the benefit of the education and training community. Standards compliant metadata can be harvested from trusted educational repositories such as those held by universities, departments of education, libraries, museums and similar bodies. The process of harvesting makes resources more discoverable, as it provides access through the edna federated search, which may also be embedded into other portals and websites.

Organisations with their own metadata repositories may wish to include all or part of the edna metadata repository in their own collections. Exchange of metadata about online resources can then enhance existing collections, enable better resource discovery for users, and reduce duplication of metadata record creation.

Benefits of participating in the edna harvesting initiative

  • Increase the visibility of your repository resources and attract traffic to your site. Your resources will become discoverable to a wider audience via the edna federated search interface.
  • Demonstrate collaboration and interoperability with other education and training organisations.
  • Provide social benefit to the Australian community by making your resources discoverable from multiple locations.
  • Maximise your return on investment [ROI] for created resources and associated metadata.
  • Contribute to the national information infrastructure.
  • Expose Australian content to the international education and training community.
  • Support the open access idea of knowledge sharing.
  • Benefit from value-added services, such as RSS feeds, that can be delivered back to organisations.

Further information

Harvesting participation form

Name of organisation
Name of unit/section [if appropriate]
Main contact person
Title of contact person
Phone [include area code]
Email
Sector
Name of site pages or repository
proposed for harvesting
Description of site/repository
Number of records for harvesting
Web address of site/repository
Metadata standard used
Do your metadata records have
the required metadata minimum of
uri, title, description, subject?
Other information you think may be useful.