[OAI-general] Dealing with different type of data provider

[Antonucci, Robert]

Sorry for the cross posting.  I have have two specific questions, one for
the OAI General and one for the OAI Implementors.

We are creating a Digital Library of Science Education data, however we are
following a different approach than many digital libraries.  We are
targeting amateur astronomers and grade schools and places that will have a
small number (10 to 40) of data items.  They will run an out of the box data
provider package.  We will use OAI to harvest their metadata and provide a
web page to search all these smaller sites.  This was intended to have a
Napster-like architecture.

The problem is that being smaller, more informal sites they probably will
not be 24x7 systems.  In fact, we expect them to fail unexepectedly and go
offline frequently for potentially long periods.

The question for the OAI general is, should less reliable sites like the
ones we are targeting still register with the OAI data provider list?  Or is
there some implied quality of service with respect to uptime?  We need a
mechanism for giving each data provider a unique ID and the OAI Repository
Identifier would be perfect, but requires joining the list.

The question for the OAI Implementors is, we are creating a set of tools
specifically to deal with the unreliability of the sites.  We are using
using Jini to setup a dynamic registration and notification system.  This
way our service provider will get a list of all data providers THAT ARE
CURRENTLY UP.  Also, the servive providers will be notified if a data
provider comes up or goes down.  It will also be notified that a data
provider has changed its metadata and a harvest request should be sent.  Is
this toolkit something that would be of interest to other people/projects?

Robert Antonucci
JOINed Digital Library
NASA GSFC