[OAI-implementers] XTCat - Experimental Thesis Catalog announcement

[Young,Jeff]

OCLC's XTCat - Experimental Thesis Catalog is now available for OAI-PMH v2
harvesting from baseURL http://alcme.oclc.org/xtcat/servlet/OAIHandler. This
repository contains 4.3 million thesis and dissertation records extracted
from OCLC's WorldCat Database and is available in oai_dc and NDLTD's
oai_etdms (http://www.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/current.html) formats. A
subset of about 8000 electronic theses and dissertations is available by
specifying the set "ETD".

Due to the size of this repository, please review the notes at
http://alcme.oclc.org/xtcat/index.html to optimize harvesting.

Interesting features include:
*	An XSL stylesheet reference is included in XTCat OAI responses. This
allows modern web browsers (e.g. IE 6.0 and Netscape 7.0) to render the
responses in HTML automatically (e.g.
http://alcme.oclc.org/xtcat/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix
=oai_dc&identifier=oai:xtcat.oclc.org:OCLCNo/ocm00000012). To view the
underlying XML, right click on the browser display and select "View Source".
(No promises are made for people using older browsers.) Typical OAI
harvesters will naturally ignore the stylesheet and see only the XML
response. 
*	The oai_etdms format defines a "resource" attribute to associate
name authority URIs with names that occur in the metadata (e.g. in record
http://alcme.oclc.org/xtcat/servlet/OAIHandler?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix
=oai_etdms&identifier=oai:xtcat.oclc.org:OCLCNo/ocm00002277). XTCat's
oai_etdms records include such resource attributes for names that exist in
the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF). The URLs used take the
form of http://authlink.oclc.org/ndltd/oai:laf.oclc.org:LCCN/n78-95332 (IE
users may get a "Access is denied" error. Hitting the browser's refresh
button corrects the problem. Send me a message if you want to know why).
Note that a URL for any record in the LCNAF can be created by substituting
another LCCN for the one in this example. The product of this URL is
actually an OAI GetRecord response using the marcxml metadataFormat. Again,
an XSL stylesheet is included in the response so modern browsers can render
it into HTML automatically.
I'm interested to hear people's experiences with this repository.
Jeff
---
Jeffrey A. Young
Consulting Software Engineer
Office of Research, Mail Code 710
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
6565 Frantz Road
Dublin, OH   43017-3395
www.oclc.org

Voice:	614-764-4342
Voice:	800-848-5878, ext. 4342
Fax:	614-718-7477
Email:	jyoung@oclc.org