Hunting and Gathering data

The PIRUS2 project has conveniently produced a patch for DSpace (and EPrints) for capturing activity data and either making it available via OAI-PMH or pushing it to a tracker service. I'm grateful to Paul Needham from Cranfield who gave me an insight in to the architecture they were using.

I patched the DSpace code and was soon making usage data available for harvesting. However, I wanted to avoid the hassle of harvesting via OAI-PMH so looked closer at the tracker code. This is a neat solution and uses Spring injection to create a listener on the DSpace Event service to capture downloads. With a little hacking to also capture item views I created an AEIOU activity class. The beauty of this is that all that is required to update the DSpace code is a configuration of the Spring context (an XML file) and the addition of a Java jar file.