Kuha2 - Open Source Metadata Server

Kuha2 is metadata server developed to provide research metadata for harvesting using multiple protocols and metadata standards. It is composed of a collection of server applications and a client. Kuha2 is targeted at data archives who wish to make their metadata harvestable by interested parties. The development of Kuha2 was originally initiated by CESSDA SaW -project and has continued as an open source project lead by FSD. In its current state Kuha2 ingests DDI files and synchronizes the metadata records into a persistant storage. It then serves the records via repository handlers that currently support OAI-PMH and OSMH protocols. Over the past year, the versions supported for ingesting have been widened from DDI 2.5 to also include DDI versions 1.2.2 and 3.1. Presently the metadata standards harvestable via OAI-PMH are DDI 2.5. and OAI-DC. However, work has already been done to extend harvestable metadata standards to include EAD3. FSD has been using Kuha2 in production for over two years. Some archives within CESSDA have reportedly been using Kuha2 to integrate to CESSDA Data Catalogue. Kuha2 is designed in usability and simplicity in mind. Therefore the software installation and use does not require advanced technical skills. The software is developed as open source, has an open issue tracker in Bitbucket and documentation is openly available and hosted at Readthedocs. Kuha2 provides a technical solution to increase visibility and discoverability of organization's data collection. The possibility of providing standardized harvestable metadata promotes interorganizational partnership and advocates good documentation practices. Kuha2's open source development model encourages contributions from bug fixes to feature implementations, while good documentation and open communication platform decrease the barrier of engagement. This presentation will give an overview of Kuha2 software, its use cases and enhancements over the past year and near future.