About metadata harvesting

Metadata harvesting is the process of retrieving metadata information from other repositories and storing it locally.

Brightspace Learning Repository supports metadata harvesting, acting as both harvester and metadata provider for external repositories. The harvesting feature uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) standards to handle requests for metadata. These standards are available at www.openarchives.org.

Harvesting allows you to search external repositories from within the Brightspace Learning Repository interface and allows external services to retrieve metadata from Brightspace Learning Repository for searching within an external application.

For complex learning objects, Brightspace Learning Repository provides the harvester with course-level metadata.

Allowing other institutions to harvest metadata from your repositories gives them a link to the object as part of the metadata. The repository remains in the D2L environment. Users of external sites cannot access the files of the object, but they can click the link to the object to view it if they authenticate with a user ID and password.

Metadata harvesting does not harvest hidden objects.

To use metadata harvesting, contact your D2L Account Manager for information on best practices and how to have the service installed on your instance.