[OAI-general] 2/27/01 - Curious and Interested

[Michael L. Nelson]

Patricia,

You're right - this should probably be covered in a FAQ or something.

Putting on my NASA hat, I can say what we get out of OAI participation.

I'm responsible for:

http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/
and 
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltrs/

though I'm less involved with the latter now.  The goal of these DLs it to
have maximum exposure for their contents.   I'd say their respective
interfaces are functional, but surely others could do a better job.  My
focus is mainly on making as much LaRC / NACA content as possible is
available on line.  To that end, both of the above have OAI interfaces:

http://naca.larc.nasa.gov/oai/
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltrs/oai/

So others can harvest our metadata and include them in their own service
provder (which points back to the "data" (full text reports in this case)
at our DLs).

Ultimately, OAI harvesting is the "right" way to build services such as:

http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/NTRS
(which I'm resposible for) and:

http://www.osti.gov/bridge/
http://www.osti.gov/preprint/
http://stinet.dtic.mil/

and other services.  And if you don't like those interfaces, you can build
your own service provider, and it can target the OAI archives of your
choosing.  An example of an OAI compliant service provider is:

http://arc.cs.odu.edu/

Which does some neat things with using Oracle and session mgmt for quick
searching.  Not satisfied?  Build your own service provider and use a
different search engine (or a totally different resource discovery
metaphor, if you'd like).

It would be nice to have an OAI interface to:

http://www.inform.bnl.gov/pubsearch/

so the contents therein could be discovered through alternate
interfaces.  I'm guessing the only current way to find:

http://www.pubs.bnl.gov/pubs/documents/21099.pdf

is through through http://www.inform.bnl.gov/pubsearch/ ....

it would be nice if people searching http://arc.cs.odu.edu could find it,
or perhaps people searching a DOE-specific service provider (OSTI?), or
perhaps a through a service provider run by the Sierra Club (for example),
which selectively harvested this report (and related reports) for their
constituency interested in the environmental planning of government
research laboratories.

In summary, the advantages of participating as a data provider are mostly
about increased visibility of your contents.  You can use the OAI protocol
to easily build things like selective dissemination of information,
alerts, update services, etc., but these projects seem to me to be related
to the "increased visibility" result.

If BNL wanted to construct a serivce provider, it could easily harvest
from other sources to build (for example) a specialized service directly
targeted for your customer base.  Or you could decide you can do a better
job ofa general service provider than OSTI and build your own ;-)

Let me know if you have any questions.

regards,

Michael

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Gorden-Ozgul, Patricia E wrote:

> Hello OAI-General List:
> 
> I'm looking for some information in general 'layman's terms' what your
> organization is doing with regard to exchange of scholarly writings.
> 
> Let me explain myself.  Perhaps that may give a clue about where my
> questions originate.  I am wondering if our organization, Brookhaven
> National Laboratory and specifically our Information Services Division (ISD
> which encompasses the Research Library where I work),  might either benefit
> from participation in what you are doing or might be a pertinent information
> source for you.
> 
> I am not a librarian, nor am I a scientist.  I am a systems specialist who
> works with relational databases in a research library.  Part of my function
> is to maintain a repository of both metadata and content of various
> publications related to the pursuit of federally-funded research and
> development activities.  I work with both UNIX and NT based systems; I've
> worked extensively in data manipulation activities to include UNIX
> utilities, perl, cgi scripting in shell and perl, SGML and HTML.   I've
> dabbled with XML.  I understand the concepts of DTDs and parsing.  I
> partially understand your specification from the protocol for metadata
> harvesting.  I've read much at your site.
> 
> Would someone be able to provide me with an outline of how OAI might be of
> benefit to us?   Or how we might contribute?  Have you a public affairs
> representative perhaps?
> 
> I appreciate any and all information you might provide.
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Pat Gorden-Ozgul               BNL-ISD Systems
> gorden@bnl.gov                 631-344-5159
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 

---
Michael L. Nelson			
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