A curriculum for learning to batch edit MODS records, inspired by RailsBridge. There are many people with metadata backgrounds working in libraries who want to learn programming skills, but do not want to become web developers. Instead, they want to learn how to maintain metadata for digital libraries. At the same time, digital libraries need help maintaining metadata, adhering to standards, augmenting records, and migrating formats. Unfortunately, there is currently a gap between the people who have the metadata expertise and the tools used by digital libraries to manage data. This curriculum is an attempt to bridge that gap.
This curriculum will be most useful if it grows from the needs of the community it serves. Please contribute sample data, or lesson ideas, or test the lessons and provide feedback, or write your own lesson! Contributions via github pull request welcome, or email bess [at] stanford [dot] edu.
Thank you to all our contributors!
- Becky Yoose
- Linda Newman
- Bess Sadler
This curriculum will use the ruby programming language, and the MODS gem. Tests will be written in rspec.
- read in a MODS record from an XML file
- run tests against it
- write basic queries, understand MODS structure
- intro to the MODS ruby library
- write a test for whether a MODS record has a language code
- add a language code to a record where it is missing
Future lessons:
- detect character encoding: utf8 vs marc8 for marc to mods transformations
- change character encoding for a record
- which fields are required for your local practice?
- test for core set
- add new required field, including tests
- VIAF: testing that authority exists & is valid
- Adding subjects for LoC linked data
- Start with a record that has string names
- look up the name
- if it's an exact match, add a link
- if it's not an exact match, do disambiguation
- skip if it already has a link
(over time you could use this to clean up authority for a set of records)