The National Library of Finland is leading a project developing a VuFind-based national discovery system, Finna (https://www.finna.fi).

The process of integrating repository content into Finna has brought into view several challenges. Some of these are due to conceptual issues in current discovery systems, which are still very much under development. These include the problematic relation between the content that is harvested directly to a "local index", and the use of central indices provided by big commercial players. It is still somewhat unclear how the open access content of the repositories fits in here.

The integration of repository content into a discovery system reveals shortcomings also in the practices of the repository community. These have remained relatively low priority partly because the search engines using OAI-PMH to harvest repository content have not proven to be popular with general users, but they become more visible once the repository metadata is harvested into a general discovery system.

Most of these problems have been known for a long time, but remain unsolved due to the heterogeneous nature of the community, and for the fact that we have been saved by Google, which doesn't really depend on the quality of the repository metadata.

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track, 24x7 Presentations

The session was recorded and is <a href="https://connect.funet.fi/p8im84xctjk/">available for watching</a> (this presentation starts at 0:10:23)