1. Description
The OLE Instance document is a container for recording holdings and item information for a bibliographic record. Even though there is a standard for MARC Holdings (which has often been loosely followed), there isn't one for items and depending on the vendor systems, these are stored in different ways. OLE Instance defines a standard for storing holdings/item information in three main sections as described below.
2. Main Sections of the OLE Instance Document
- oleHoldings: This section records general holdings information when there may not be a specific holdings format like MARC holdings or for serials like books where there won't be one.
- sourceHoldings: This section represents specific holdings information in the native format. Examples are MARC holdings, MODS holdings or any other format specific holdings.
- items: This section records information about 1 or more items.
For a given bibliographic record, only one of either oleHoldings or sourceHoldings can be used as the main holdings record. OLE will not support usage of both for a given record as that leads to overhead of managing data consistencies between the two sections.
3. Schema
4. Storage
The OLE Instance document will be stored in ole-docstore in three separate documents namely, instance, holdings and items. Each of the documents gets a unique identifier generated by ole-docstore (Apache Jackrabbit).