deleting a record from the registry

[Theresa Dower]

Pat,


Short answer: Yes, please! Also try to ensure this removes the item from your ListHeaders response, or add deletion status information to the ListIdentifiers response (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#ListIdentifiers).


Long answer: You don't strictly have to do any of this, as your registry is marked "transient" in its Identify response (http://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/reg/oai?verb=Identify), regarding the treatment of deleted records. "Transient" is the OAI-PMH tag for promising nothing regarding deleted records, not even consistency (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html#DeletedRecords).  The very existence of this tag suggests a more lax curation atmosphere for some fields using OAI technology than we strive for.


However, to be a good IVOA registry citizen, I would greatly encourage going through this effort rather than just quietly deleting the records. The will keep your ghost records from persisting in full registries' searches until such time as each builds its own snapshot of all registries from scratch, which does not happen often.  If you do go through this effort, you might as well change "transient" to "full" in your registry record to note other registries can trust record status. If you take the time to make this change and want some end-to-end testing, I'm happy to run the STScI harvester against it and check the logs/status on our end.


Thanks!

--Theresa

________________________________
From: registry-bounces at ivoa.net <registry-bounces at ivoa.net> on behalf of Patrick Dowler <pdowler.cadc at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, September 12, 2019 11:07:29 AM
To: registry at ivoa.net
Subject: deleting a record from the registry


As you recall, we are operating a really simple hack OAI publishing registry and I have reached the point where I have to delete some old records. Looking at VOResource, I think the minimum I have to do is:

- set the status attr on the resource to "deleted"
- set the updated attr of the resource to current timestamp so it gets harvested
- set the datestamp in the header to match

Is that it?

Can/should I remove other metadata? I'd like to remove the content and capability elements, but would leave the title, shortName, identifier, and curation in the "deleted" record".

thanks,

--
Patrick Dowler
Canadian Astronomy Data Centre
Victoria, BC, Canada
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