Hi,
I think I followed that, and so this may help you.
If I didn’t, sorry for wasting your time. :-)

So OAI-PMH is rather poor, in terms of the richness of the metadata types, etc., and for example you only get creator strings, not the IDs usually.
But as you say, this gives a low barrier to entry, which is good.
I used to harvest all the OAI-PMH stuff as best I could, turn it into RDF, which is a richer, structured format, and put it into an RDF store, so it could be queried using something called Linked Data, and its associated query language, SPARQL.
A couple of years ago I got bored with that, so I don’t update it any more, but a lot of it is still there if anyone wants it:
http://oai.rkbexplorer.com

However, those nice people over at ePrints (which I see sussex uses), also allow the data to be exported as RDF from source, and this is more useful for me.
So I built a harvester for all the ePrints archives that fetched the RDF for each item.
It then puts this RDF into a store, as above: http://foreign.rkbexplorer.com/

So the short story is that you may well find the data you want in this store, and it may be queryable the way you want - I’m not sure.
So your entry from your email can be got by:
http://foreign.rkbexplorer.com/browse/?type=resource&forceLocal=true&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsro.sussex.ac.uk%2Fid%2Feprint%2F47853
That is, URLencode the URI, and ask the system to pretend it is local and do the equivalent of URI resolution.
You can also do ordinary SPARQL queries.
http://foreign.rkbexplorer.com/sparql/

There is also a sameAs store (CRS associated with this that will bridge with other repositories where there duplicate entries, and indeed bridge within your repository where we have identified multiple IDs for the same entity.
Eg
http://foreign.rkbexplorer.com/crs/export/?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsro.sussex.ac.uk%2Fid%2Fperson%2Fext-16452
Interestingly, this shows you have 3 IDs for AR Tate, but one of them has been confused with another person, I think.

Please note, that this runs on a very old machine that runs a lot of other stuff (such as sameAs.org), is unmaintained, and is not a funded activity - so please treat with care, and be careful if you get to rely on it.

Best
Hugh

On 20 Mar 2014, at 11:30, Chris Keene <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> In the early days of repositories I know a lot of work went in to defining standards for making them inter-operable and to expose their data, notable the OAI initiative. I'm hoping some who were involved in (or who followed) those developments could help enlighten me.
>  
> For a number of years I've been curious around the reasoning behind adopting Dublin Core via OAI-PMH as the de facto way to harvest and obtain metadata from a repository. (DC isn’t the only format, but it is by far the most common used).
>  
> To use data exposed by a system - such as a repository - the first thing I would have thought you need to do is interpret the incoming information. 
>  
> When reading information from an IR, the system/script that is importing it needs to establish a number of things:
> - common bibliographic fields; title, authors, date, publisher, vol/issue, issn/isbn, publication title etc.
> - DOI
> - link to IR record 
> - is full text available? if so where, and in what format.
> - what type of item is it.
> - Description, citation, subjects etc.
>  
> While using a common standard (DC) is clearly a good thing. Processing the above can be a challenge, especially as different repository software platforms and versions can present key pieces of information in different ways. This is perhaps made a little harder as there is no field to specify the software/version in the metadata output
>  
> I'll give a couple examples:
> To extract the vol/issue/publication title involves looking at all the "dc:identifier" fields, identifying which identifier contains a citation, and then deconstruction the citation to extract the data (and parsing citations is no easy process in itself).
>  
> To obtain if a record has the full text openly available, ie OA (with an Eprints system): Check to see if there is a dc:format - if it exists there is a file associated with the record.
> But to check it is OA, and not locked down (which is quite common) find the dc:identifier which starts with the same domain name as the OAI interface, presume it is a link to the full text, try and access it, if you succeed (http status code 200) then it is OA. Though if you only have the metadata to work with and can't try and retrieve the URL while processing the record, you obviously can’t do this. 
> Dspace provides quite different data via OAI-PMH so this method would not work.  
>  
> The reason I bring this up now is that I'm currently trying to improve how our repository records are displayed in our discovery system (Primo, from Ex Libris), the metadata is currently so poor we have hidden them. 
> A key concept of these systems is that they know which items the user has access to (across all the library's collections and subscriptions), and by default only returns those which the user can access.  While Primo has quite a complex system for configuring how records are imported, it doesn't extend to the sort of logic described above.
>  
> So from my specific use case (and other dabbling in this area) the data provided by OAI-PMH DC seems difficult to work with.
>  
> I'd be interesting to learn a bit of the history of the thinking of how this approach cam about, and whether there are better approaches in processing the data than those I have described here.
>  
> Regards, and thanks in advance to any insights
> Chris
>  
> For reference here are two examples (you may find using Firefox, view source, works best)
> Eprints (record with a file attached, but not OA)
> http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/47853/
> oai http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/cgi/oai2?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:sro.sussex.ac.uk:47853
>  
> Dspace
> https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/164
> http://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/dspace-oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk:1842/164
>  
>  
> Chris Keene  - Technical Development Manager, University of Sussex Library 
> Contact: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/150000

--
Hugh
023 8061 5652