[OAI-implementers] points to ponder

[Mark Doyle]

Greetings,

On Wednesday, May 14, 2003, at 11:17  AM, Tim Brody wrote:

> Andy Powell wrote:
>
> > [ ... ]
>
>> I'm not quite clear Where the original question was coming from, but,  
>> for
>> example, I think it would be much more questionable to invent a record
>> format called 'fullText' and to then use the protocol to exchange
>> 'resources' (as opposed to 'records').  At that point, one would be  
>> using
>> the 'protocol for metadata harvesting' to do something other than
>> 'harvesting metadata'.
>
> BMC expose their free-access articles via a proprietory XML format  
> "bmc_article":
> http://celestial.eprints.org/cgi-bin/oaia2/ 
> biomedcentral.com?verb=GetRecord;metadataPrefix=bmc_article;identifier= 
> oai:biomedcentral.com:ar407

We do this as well at the APS (but in mode 0 - only certain IP's can  
harvest). What I
would really like is an analog of SOAP with attachments where I could  
transport
a PDF along with the OAI metadata "header" - this would enable us to do  
all sorts
of interesting things (including simplifying our mirroring). I know I  
could base64
encode the PDF and shove it in some tags, but that isn't satisfying. I  
would prefer
not to have to create my own proprietary extension to OAI  in order do  
this. What work
is currently being done or planned in this direction?

Note that with the bmc_article you don't really get the full article  
because items
like figures are missing. I would like to be able to also transport a  
bundle of
files as attachments so that an entire article could be delivered.

Cheers,
Mark