Enabling Legacy Repositories

In the domain of architecture, a huge amount of digital contents useful to academic and professional users are available online, which in principle are accessible from all over the world. However, the contents of locked in legacy systems are hard to find with traditional search engines. The MACE project aims to connect architectural repositories located all over Europe in order to make their contents more accessible, giving communities of architecture and design the possibility to use them. We show how digital content from legacy repositories can be made available through metadata harvesting and reuse, by using the examples of WINDS, an online learning system, and DYNAMO, a growing collection of architectural projects. From a WINDS perspective, we describe an OAI mapping approach for repositories that can be adapted to specific needs with small effort. As far as DYNAMO is concerned, we focus on the flexible approach we adopted to connect DYNAMO's dynamic classification metadata with the constantly changing MACE taxonomy. We discuss the major problems encountered and solved in both WINDS and DYNAMO, and the lessons learnt. This paper sets out a starting point and also reports on the issues of implementation. It addresses repository owners with technical knowledge who want to open up their repositories to MACE, but are afraid of high efforts.