Adding New Metadata

An eprints archive consists of
• an SQL database which stores all the information about the eprints (the publication metadata),
• some XML configuration files that configure the EPrints software
  • the subjects file is a simplified version of one such file
• and some Perl modules (.pm files) which extend the EPrints software with instructions for how to manage (input, validate, output) the eprints metadata

Archive Configuration Files

The EPrints configuration contains a number of key files that must be changed if you wish to alter the kinds of metadata that are associated with "an eprint".

Key Configuration Files

The fundamental ones are
• ArchiveMetadataFieldsConfig.pm which defines the types of data which an eprint can store,
• metadata-types.xml which declares the metadata fields that can be entered by a user for each kind of dataset (i.e. eprint, user, document, security) and
• phrases-language.xml (which defines what to call these fields in the current language).

Other Configuration Files

There are also
• citations-language.xml that shows how to incorporate the metadata into a citation,
• ArchiveConfig.pm a super-config file which imports a number of other archive-specific configurations but which also defines different views and searches.

metadata-types.xml

This file describes the components of each of the major datasets, in particular the eprint.
• Each different type of eprint (article, book chapter etc) can have different 'fields'
  • (an article needs journal information, but a book chapter doesn't)
• This file is used to automatically generate the "submission form", so fields are collected together into 'pages'.

Extract from metadata-types.xml

<dataset name="eprint">
  <type name="article">
    <page name="core" />
    <field name="title" required="yes" />
    <field name="creators" required="yes" />

    <page name="pubinfo" />
    <field name="publication" required="yes" />
    <field name="volume" />
    <field name="number" />

ArchiveMetadataFieldsConfig.pm

This Perl module declares the type of each field with information about how it should be input.

 {name => "creators", type => "name", multiple => 1, input_boxes => 4,
          hasid => 1, input_id_cols=>20,
          family_first=>1, hide_honourific=>1, hide_lineage=>1 },

 {name => "title", type => "longtext", multilang=>0 },

 {name => "publication", type => "text" },

 {name => "volume", type => "text", maxlength => 6 },

 {name => "number", type => "text", maxlength => 6 } 

Each field can be of type: boolean, int, longtext, name, pagerange, set, text, url

Phrases file

The names of each field (and helpful text for entering the required data) should be given in each phrases-language.xml file.

<ep:phrase ref="eprint_fieldname_creators">Authors/Creators</ep:phrase>
<ep:phrase ref="eprint_fieldhelp_creators">Enter in the format
given on the first page or title page. If there are more than four
authors, click on the [More Spaces] button.
<br />Example: [<span class="example">Smith</span>] [<span class="example">J.P.</span>] [<span class="example">j.smith@soton.ac.uk</span>]
</ep:phrase>

<ep:phrase ref="eprint_fieldname_title">Title</ep:phrase>
<ep:phrase ref="eprint_fieldhelp_title">The title of the item.
The title should not end with a full stop, but may end with a
question mark. There is no way to make italic text, please enter
it normally. If you have a subtitle, it should be preceded with a
colon [:]. Use capitals only for the first word and for proper
nouns.
<br />Example: <span class="example">Mathematics for engineers and scientists. 5th edition</span>
<br />Example: <span class="example">Ecosystems of the world. Vol. 26. Estuaries of the world</span>
</ep:phrase>

ArchiveConfig.pm

This file is used to define customised browse views, searches and subscription functions.

$c->{browse_views} = [
        { id=>"year", allow_null=>1, fields=>"date_effective;res=year",
	  subheadings=>"type", order=>"-date_effective/title", heading_level=>2 },
        { id=>"subjects", fields=>"subjects", order=>"-date_effective/title",
	  hideempty=>1 },
	{ id=>"type",  fields=>"type", order=>"-date_effective" }
];

Example: Project Title

To allow users to add a project title to an eprint (to indicate which project sponsored a paper, or to find out all the outcomes of a particular project)

1. add <field name="project" /> at the end of the "core" page in the metadata-types.xml file
2. add { name => "project", type => "text" }, to the eprint specification in ArchiveMetadataFieldsConfig.pm
3. add the following lines to phrases-en.xml
   

     <ep:phrase ref="eprint_fieldname_project">Project
   	Title</ep:phrase>
     <ep:phrase ref="eprint_fieldhelp_project">The name
   	of the project which resulted in this
   	publication.</ep:phrase>

Example: Project Title (2)

Then run the following commands

• stop apache
• bin/erase_tables archive
• bin/create_tables archive
• bin/import_subjects archive
• bin/generate_static archive
• bin/create_user archive ...
• start apache

BEWARE: adding a metadata field requires recreating the database which means deleting all the eprints/users/subjects that are already stored in the database.
• You may like to consider running export_xml and import_xml to rescue your work!