Information for Institutions

The nzresearch.org.nz harvester gathers metadata from institutional repositories at New Zealand research institutions. All the metadata is harvested from universities and polytechnics at present, but the site hopes to grow to encompass other types of institution.

Where to get more information about institutional repositories

There are several sources of information about institutional repositories in New Zealand. A good place to start is the OARiNZ Knowledge Base created and maintained by Victoria University of Wellington and the OARiNZ Project.

The National Research Discovery Service Metadata Guidelines sets out metadata guidelines for use in New Zealand Institutional Repositories that wish to contribute metadata to this website. The metadata guidelines are based on the current and future metadata standards used at New Zealand research institutions in their institutional repositories.

The New Zealand Institutional Repositories mailing list (nzir-l) is a forum for discussing issues related to technical and administrative aspects of institutional repositories, and also for the discussion of this website.

How to add or update repository information

nzresearch.org.nz requires the following details describing each repository:

  • Institution Name
  • Institution Logo
  • Textual description of institution research program
  • Repository administrator contact details
  • Repository homepage
  • OAI-PMH base URL

Please contact us for more information on how to add your repository to nzresearch.org.nz, or to update your repository details.

Click-through, harvest and metadata reports

nzresearch.org.nz generates the following reports for repository administrators:

  • Click-through reports that list the most-requested from nzresearch.org.nz for each institution (as well as overall statistics). The archived reports are available.
  • Harvest Reports that detail the number of records imported at each harvest (not online) and harvest logs that record all harvester activity.
  • Metadata Quality Reports that show how many metadata records have been imported, how many metadata warnings and errors were encountered, and what the overall quality score is for each institution and the country as a whole.

Using NZIR Admin to identify problems in your metadata

nzresearch.org.nz validates the metadata it harvests from repositories, and stores any metadata warnings and errors as NZIR Administration (nzir_admin) metadata. This metadata is used to generate the metadata quality reports described above, and can also be used by repository administrators to get a feed of metadata errors from your repository.

Institutional Repository administrators can perform an SRU search, request an RSS feed, or request an OAI-PMH harvest of the nzir_admin metadata for their repository. (Note this will be an empty set if the repository has no metadata errors)

See the How to use the SRU Service page for more detailed information.

Harvest frequency

Nzresearch.org.nz performs an incremental harvest every evening. This means it gets a copy of all the records that have been modified or created since the last harvest and adds it to the nzresearch.org.nz database. So if your repository is working correctly, any changes you make during the working day should propagate through to nzresearch.org.nz the same evening.

The nzresearch.org.nz administrator can perform a full harvest at your request. This may be useful if you have been making changes to your repository structure, or if you suspect that some records have not been captured in the daily harvests.

If you're interested in the technical details of how your repository was harvested, this information is available through the harvest logs.