[OAI-general] Articles About DSpace and Open Archives Forum in _D-Lib Magazine_ (Jan 2003)

[Tim Brody]

Reading the OAIF article they could've drawn more attention to a very useful
comment:
"[OAI] ... implementations concluded within one-quarter year and by one
programmer ..."
And that a sizeable portion of this is building the system to provide the
metadata (e.g. converting internal formats to DC), and to providing
maintainence - i.e. the costs are more than just providing an OAI/XML
interface.

"About 70% of the tools used to become OAI compatible were self-developed by
Data Providers and Service Providers. Most of the Data Providers and Service
Providers make their tools and source code available for others to use ...
and also used frequently are PHP and XML."

(I think this article could do with a little technical input - every OAI
implementation uses XML, if it doesn't it's not OAI ...)
It would be interesting to know why projects create self-developed
solutions, rather than building on existing tools? Are the existing tools
insufficient, or is OAI seen to be simple enough to be re-implemented?

Does anybody know what has happened with the Cyclades project? It looks very
interesting but the web site appears not to have been updated in over a
year?

I can only comment on what I know but it's a shame they don't mention my own
Citebase as a useful example of extended services - it combines OAI &
full-text harvesting, along with the traditional meta-search. Also not
mentioned Celestial - which provides a 1.x to 2.0 gateway (making which
version of OAI being implemented a mute point).

It would be good to see the success (or not) of projects judged by how much
/content/ they expose, rather than technical achievements. In this respect I
believe Europe is lagging far behind the US - arXiv.org, LoC & OCLC dwarf
most of the other repositories out there. This is a failure to convince
those who control the content that open access is a Good Thing - a challenge
far greater than preservation, metadata formats, or any other technical
issue.

n.b. DSpace isn't as of 2003/02/06 OAI compliant (Repo-Explorer & Celestial
both fail to harvest). When implementing any XML application input should be
checked for bad chars (no control characters, and any >128 characters should
be checked against the Unicode character set).

All the best,
Tim.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerry Mckiernan" <gerrymck@iastate.edu>
To: <SPARC-IR@arl.org>; <eprints-underground@ecs.soton.ac.uk>;
<oai-eprints@fafner.openlib.org>; <oai-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu>
Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 4:45 PM
Subject: [OAI-general] Articles About DSpace and Open Archives Forum in
_D-Lib Magazine_ (Jan 2003)


> To All/
>
>     OAI and Institutional Repository Folk  may be interested in two
*excellent* articles in the January 2003 issue of _D-Lib Magazine_.
>
> DSpace: An Open Source Dynamic Digital Repository
>
> [ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/smith/01smith.html ]
>
> and
>
> Open Archives Activities and Experiences in Europe: An Overview by the
Open Archives Forum
>
> [http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/dobratz/01dobratz.html  ]
>
>    Regards,
>
> /Gerry
>
> Gerry McKiernan
> Open Librarian
> Iowa State University
> Ames IA 50011
>
> gerrymck@iastate.edu
>
>
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> OAI-general@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
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