Cookbook: Viewing a CONTENTdm collection's metadata field nicknames

CONTENTdm nicknames (or 'nicks') are the internal names that it assigns to metadata fields. Nicknames are used in several places in MIK, such as in the NormalizeDate and InsertXmlFromTemplate metadata manipulators.

The CONTENTdm Collection Inspector provides a way to view a collection's nicknames. For example, to get a list of the field nicknames for the collection with the alias 'vanpunk', run this command:

php cdminspect --inspect=nicknames --alias=vanpunk

The result is a list of fields and their nicknames:

Field nicknames for Vancouver Punk Rock Collection

Field label => field nickname
=============================
Title => title
Bands => bands
Poster Artist => poster
Description => descri
Date => date
Display date => displa
Type => type
Format => format
Identifier => identi
Producer or Presenter => produc
Language => langua
Venue => venue
Dimensions (inches) => dimens
Poster text => postea
Rights => rights
Cover Artist => cover
Publisher => publis
Editor => editor
Author => author
Subjects => subjec
Place => place
Full text => full
Archival file => fullrs
OCLC number => dmoclcno
Date created => dmcreated
Date modified => dmmodified
CONTENTdm number => dmrecord
CONTENTdm file name => find

The human-readable metadata field label is on the left, and the field's nickname is on the right.

If you don't want to install and run the CONTENTdm Collection Inspector, you can look at the raw CONTENTdm metadata that MIK retrieves from CONTENTdm. This metadata is available in your tookchain's temp_directory .ini setting. However, this metadata is stored as a serialized PHP array and may not prove very useful when determining the nicknames to use in your template. The nicknames commonly look like "title", "creato", "subjec", "date", "identi", and "rights", but they can vary depending on what the corresponding human-readable labels are.

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