Zephir: Metadata Management

Zephir is the bibliographic metadata management system for HathiTrust. It is located at and managed by a team at the California Digital Library, part of the University of California. Zephir supports HathiTrust services by providing information about the items in our digital collection, assisting users in finding what they are looking for, enabling HathiTrust to provide access to materials, and allows for inventory management of titles within our collection. Zephir highlights the modularity of the HathiTrust repository, the capacity for distributed development of repository infrastructure, and a successful collaboration between University of California CDL staff, HathiTrust staff, and staff at the University of Michigan working in direct support of HathiTrust. 

Benefits of Zephir 

• Advances discovery through the use of bibliographic information. Bibliographic records provide general descriptions of items (title, author, publisher, date), as well as summaries, descriptions and additional information that are often not available in the item itself (e.g., author death date, subject headings, government document status) 
• Ensures items with the same title or edition will be together on the same record, improving discovery for researchers and students. 
• Enables automatic and manual investigations into the copyright or in-copyright status of items in order to provide the broadest access to materials as possible.

Zephir interactions with other HathiTrust systems

Export to HathiTrust Ingest Framework 

On a daily basis, Zephir exports a list of volume identifiers and additional metadata to the University of Michigan for newly loaded and newly updated records from contributors. The HathiTrust Ingest Framework (Feed) utilizes this information in the digital repository ingest process.

Import from HathiTrust Ingest Framework

On a daily basis, Zephir receives a list of volume identifiers from the University of Michigan originating in the HathiTrust Ingest Framework (Feed) representing digital objects ingested to the HathiTrust repository the previous day.

Export to HathiTrust Catalog

Zephir uses a list of volume identifiers from the University of Michigan representing digital objects ingested to the HathiTrust repository the previous day to determine which bibliographic records are included in its daily export to the University of Michigan for further processing and use in HathiTrust’s access systems.

People 

The University of California’s (UC) California Digital Library (CDL) manages the Zephir system for HathiTrust. 

Charlie Collett, Technical Lead
Barbara Cormack, Metadata Analyst
Raiden van Bronkhorst, Developer
Lam Pham, Developer
Sarah Houghton, Director, Discovery and Delivery Team

 

California Digital Library

The University of California (UC) is a founding member of HathiTrust, and the California Digital Library (CDL) has historically been a locus of coordination and technical development for the UC Libraries.  A team at CDL developed Zephir to support specific HathiTrust requirements by working in consultation with staff at the University of Michigan who managed HathiTrust bibliographic metadata from HathiTrust’s inception until 2013.