[OAI-implementers] returning *data* (as opposed to metadata)

[Ben Henley]

 Hi there,

 What if I decided to have a format that would return full data rather than
metadata? We have a database of scientific articles which are stored as XML
(mean size 60KB) and rendered as HTML on our site. But what if I decided
that one of the "metadata formats" returned by our OAI interface was the
full XML of an article?

 Would a 60KB+ Record be likely to cause harvesters to choke? What other
implications (implementation or otherwise) would doing this have? Would
anyone use it? (Bear in mind these articles are open access, but still
copyrighted by the authors so you couldn't harvest them and use them
commercially).  Is this a sane thing to consider?

	Thanks,

	Ben

Ben Henley <mailto:ben@biomedcentral.com>                    
Usability Engineer
BioMed Central    
http://www.biomedcentral.com