Highly Automated Import of Metadata into an Institutional Repository: A PHP Tool

Nowadays researches are often requested to submit their publications to their local institutional repository (IR). This is a rather time-consuming administrative task, which they would readily avoid. Besides improving the publication-submission procedure, the need to import publications from other databases (DBs) directly instead of asking the researchers to submit their publications manually, is paramount. Repositories have dealt with this problem in the past (e.g., Roy and Gray 2018; Li 2016 ). Nevertheless, to our knowledge there is no free tool available that allows the automatic import from well-known DBs such as Scopus or Web of Science, which is based on PHP – a programming language vastly used by repository developers. Our IR is based on Drupal/Islandora; however, we aim to provide code that can be used by as many systems as possible. Therefore, our approach is based on two levels: (a) a PHP library to abstract the interaction with the publication DBs, providing a unified interface that can be used by any PHP application or script; (b) a Drupal module using the PHP library to implement the automatic import of metadata into Islandora repositories.