[OAI-implementers] Sets in and subjects in OAI-PMH

[Hussein Suleman]

hi

there is already a "setDescription" container associated with any set 
that can do this, possibly using the "branding" format that you can find 
in the OAI guidelines.

see section 3.2 on http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines.htm

ttfn,
----hussein


Steve Sarapata wrote:

> ENC uses sets. After reviewing the white paper below I think expanding
> ListSets may solve quite a few problems. One issue I need to deal with
> is recognition of partners and funding agencies through a logo, or icon.
> I assign a <setSpec> value in the header which the NSDL folks in turn
> look up and display. For my purposes a tag in ListSets such as <setLogo>
> or <setBrand> may provide more standardization, flexibility and utility
> across the OAI community.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Caroline Arms [mailto:caar@loc.gov] 
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 9:53 AM
> To: Hussein Suleman
> Cc: oai-implementers@oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu
> Subject: Re: [OAI-implementers] Sets in and subjects in OAI-PMH
> 
> On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Hussein Suleman wrote:
> 
>>p.s. is LCSH international? is it used in South Africa? Ethiopia?
>>
> 
> 
> No. LCSH is not international.  It is used in many places, but the
> policies and practices do not include an attempt to serve international
> needs (to judge from discussions of the problem issues that required
> policy decisions, when I had a detail to the part of LC that maintains
> LCSH).  LCSH is also enormous.  I remember an analysis in the fairly
> early
> days of OAI by Old Dominion that implied that LC didn't use controlled
> vocabulary in its subject terms in OAI records, because of the number of
> distinct terms in our records.
> 
> Back to sets in OAI.
> 
> I agree that discussion about what is useful for harvesters is valuable.
> If there is good evidence that certain practices for sets work for
> certain categories of service providers, data providers who care
> about whether or how their stuff appears in those particular services
> may take steps to use sets that aren't related to internal processes or
> organization.  Absent any such evidence, you can hardly blame them for
> doing what is easy.  And for many, there are no resources to do
> anything more than a simple technical transformation from internal
> records.
> 
> For what it's worth, the issue of how early implementer were using sets
> was looked at in the technical discussions that led to the development
> of
> version 2 of OAI-PMH.  
> 
> "Out of 49 repositories, 39 are using sets. Of these 13 appear to
> partition their collection by subject area, 13 by genre, and 9 by source
> of records."
> 
> See the table at the end of 
> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/oai/collection-description/wh
> itepaper.html
> for more detail.  [Thanks to Andy Powell for being a pack-rat and still
> having the file at the URL I found by mining my e-mail!]
> 
> It's not clear that anyone was using sets to provide fine-grained
> subject
> breakdowns (which some repositories now are).  There may be communities
> of
> interest where that is useful and feasible, but in the cultural heritage
> area (personal papers, digitized, manuscripts, photographs, museum
> artifacts, etc.) there is plenty of evidence that agreement on "topical"
> terminology and rules for application across heterogeneous domains is
> neither feasible, nor indeed helpful.
> 
> For the content in the LCOA1 repository, LC has more interest in
> creating
> sets that are useful for Kat Hagedorn (OAIster) and Sara Shreeves (UIUC)
> and other service providers that focus on building services that are
> likely to serve people to whom our digitized historical content is of
> interest.  My sense is that a set breakdown that suits those service
> -providers (and this sort of content) would be very different from a
> breakdown that is useful for current scientific scholarly communication.
> 
> Perhaps providers of production services can indicate if this list
> is a useful forum for discussing what practices in relation to sets make
> sense to them.  They may be having discussions within a community
> through
> other lists or meetings.
> 
>    Caroline Arms                                      caar@loc.gov
>    Library of Congress
>    Office of Strategic Initiatives
> 
> **** All views expressed are personal *********
> 
>    
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
=====================================================================
hussein suleman ~ hussein@cs.uct.ac.za ~ http://www.husseinsspace.com
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