LA Referencia, through its Technical Team, has developed a free and open-source software platform (GPL 3) for information harvesting that not only supports the central node of the regional network but also serves as an aggregator service and national portal for member countries. This technological solution originated during the pilot phase of the IDB project from March to September 2013. By mid-2014, with support from Science and Technology agencies, the need for a transferable solution with a set of technological enhancements was identified.
Since 2015, LA Referencia’s technology has been installed in:
Harvesting, Transformation, and Validation Component for OAI-PMH Metadata. This component is responsible for harvesting OAI sources, validating metadata records, and transforming them to comply with the network’s quality guidelines. The harvesting component was initially based on OCLCHarvester2. The platform is developed in Java 1.7, using the Spring framework and the PostgreSQL 9.X database engine. It is also compatible with MySQL.
This component is responsible for publishing metadata through the OAI-PMH protocol. It is currently based on the DSpace-XOAI software, which provides high flexibility and scalability for interoperability with other international metadata aggregators.
This component provides a user-friendly, mobile-responsive search interface for accessing the aggregated metadata. In addition, it offers statistics on metadata quality and the progress of harvesting processes. The portal is based on the open-source software VuFind (http://vufind.org), with custom modules developed specifically for the platform.
