If you have questions about Harvesting, send an email to techsupport@midhudson.org and include Harvesting FAQ in your subject. The questions our members submit are used to build the information for this page.
Q. How are harvested resources selected?
A. Harvesting is part of our shared catalog. All harvested collections must be recommended for review. Your library’s county organization is a great place to start a conversation about a resource that you would like to recommend for harvesting. Representatives at that meeting from Central Library Collection Development or Resource Sharing, could take the discussion to those committees and recommend the resource to the DA. To be harvested a collection must be:
- Publicly available without copyright restrictions, or owned and sharable by the library or group of libraries
- The collection must exist in an OAI/PMH compatible format on a content management system already. Encore requires this and most established digital collections will meet this standard.
- The collection should be relevant and have value for the entire MHLS community.
Q. If my library has historical images or documents, how can I get them included.
A. First to be eligible you would have to meet the criteria above. If your collection has been digitized, it will need to be included in a collection that meets the OAI/PMH requirements or be hosted by one. One option is to add your collection to an existing site, like NY Heritage. MHLS libraries can store their digital collections on NYHeritage through the South Eastern NY Resources Council (SENYLRC). More information about the process and fees can be found at the HRVH website https://hrvh.org/become_a_partner .
Q. Why don’t I find these records in Sierra?
A. The records are virtual records in place only in our discovery platform. The records are in the format of indexed text, created from the metadata records of the external host. There are no MARC records in the sierra system. Each night the external data is checked