Towards multi bibliographic format support in Invenio

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Invenio Interest Group Presentations

Invenio is a digital-library management system, its current development is evolving towards a more flexible behaviour, supporting extension of it capabilities through the insertion of new source-code. In this direction we are working to enhance the support of different formats in the incoming data: Invenio currently uses MARC as format for representing bibliographic information. Our goal is to provide Invenio the tools to work with different formats, such as EAD or NLM, in the same way that it supports MARC. To achieve that, the parts of Invenio aimed to manipulate the record structure have been enhanced towards a framework-like logic: a set of so called “readers” can be developed to read from specific formats and produce a common internal structure to represent the bibliographic information in a lossless translation process. The selected format for the new representation was JSON because of its flexibility, language independency and human/machine readability among other reasons. Within the JSON internal representation of data, the level of details for each imported format is completely up to the developer/administrator, so that there’s no technical limit neither to the amount of atomic-parts nor to the amount of embedded sub-levels that Invenio could manage into new-formats record.