initial data migration using REST interface
- Joe Slag (Unlicensed)
As a first step towards importing collection data, the Walker has decided to pull basic object information from an existing OAI source (http://collections.walkerart.org/oai/) and then insert that data into our CollectionSpace installation using its REST service interface. Because it's the fullest-featured of the options, we're pulling our OAI data in CDWALite format.
CollectionSpace 1.5+ required!
Please note that this approach did not work with versions before 1.5, as they all required MIME-encoded payloads, and we weren't able to send a satisfactory combination/sequence of headers to CollectionSpace. Now that REST payloads can be Plain Old XML, that problem has disappeared.
Longer Term
Ultimately, we'll be replacing the pull from OAI with some custom code interfacing with the Walker's legacy collections management system. Still, we hope that some of this example might be helpful to someone, particularly as a working example of listing and then inserting objects via the REST interface.
The Code
See https://github.com/jslag/CollectionSpace-batch-insert for the python code we wrote for this task.