[OAI-implementers] Experimental OAI Registry at UIUC

[Thomas G. Habing]

Hi Caroline,

Thanks for taking the time to look at the registry and provide some feedback.

Caroline Arms wrote:
> Tom,
> 
> A first glance suggests that this is a very interesting view of the OAI
> landscape from many perspectives.  For me, your report on our OAI data
> provider at LC provides a useful view of our repository that I can point
> others at (e.g. for the record counts).  I'm assuming part of the
> motivation for creating it was for UIUC to select content for harvesting.  
> I can certainly see its value for potential harvesters who are doing
> manual selection of cultural heritage content in focused areas.  I can
> image the search feature being particularly useful to take advantage of
> rich set descriptions.  

This is exactly why I started building it.  Although, I must say that once I 
got started it began to take on a life of its own.  Its amazing all the 
things you can think of doing once you have a rich database in front of you. 
  :-)

> 
> One comment.  It took me some time to see that the link from a number of
> records in the count table was actually a way to sample record(s) included
> in the indexing.  For understanding why a search generated a hit, I think
> it would be useful to be able to get to the complete set of samples for a
> repository from the repository summary -- or to get straight to the
> samples that generated hits from the hits list.  Just a thought.

Good ideas.  I will see if there is anything I can do to improve in this area.

> 
> As a small aside, special characters are not being handled gracefully.  
> When I view http://oai.grainger.uiuc.edu/registry/details.asp?id=103 in
> Netscape 7.02 or IE 6.0 the description and title in cyrillic for the
> grabill set are not coming through.  I realize there are a lot of things
> that could be wrong (and haven't had time for detective work).  Are other
> seeing the same problem?

There are definitely some character encoding problems.  Not just with your 
cyrillic but also with some of the asian languages, and probably others. 
Figuring this one out is my priority for the moment.

> 
> Thanks again for the tool and summary reports.
> 
> Caroline Arms
> Office of Strategic Initiatives                  caar@loc.gov
> Library of Congress
> 

Kind regards,
	Tom


-- 
Thomas Habing
Research Programmer, Digital Library Projects
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
155 Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, MC-274
thabing@uiuc.edu, (217) 244-4425
http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu