[OAI-implementers] Selective Harvesting OAI-PMH Global Harvesters

[Atanu Garai]

*Apologies for cross-posting*

Dear Colleagues

Globethics.net intends to harvest all ethics related metadata from
open repositories around the world and interpolate the same as part of
the digital library. We feel that this would be a great service towards
fulfilling the information and knowledge needs and exchange for the
global ethics community. In so doing, we have studied few alternatives
and solutions, as given below:

1. OAI-PMH 2.0 specification and implementation guidelines:
The original OAI-PMH 2.0 specification and implementation guideline for
'service providers' like harvesters/aggregators provides steps towards
implementing harvesting engine. The only way to provide subject (or
keyword) related metadata retrieval, according to this guideline, is to
specify the subject in the Set. A closer examination in the set-spec,
as available in the ROAR
(http://roar.eprints.org/) tells us that 'ethics'
as subject does not appear in the data providers that I have surveyed
so far. The conclusion is that using OAI-PMH 2.0 implementation
guidelines we will not be able to harvest metadata in this domain in an
optimal fashion.

2. The second strategy is the strategy followed by AVANO -
http://www.ifremer.fr/avano/ - a harvester in the domain of aquatic and
marine sciences. Essentially, they aggregate all the metadata in a
temporary (internal) database, run a search query and then interpolate
the relevant records onto their AVANO public interface. This is a
advantageous proposition for subject-specialist harvester, but we are
constrained by resources to implement this strategy.

3. The third way, which I have not found any implementation example so
far, is to take the relevant metadata from already existing global
harvesters like OAI and interpolate into Globethics..net server. The
current global harverster that we are examining are - OAISTER and
Scientific Commons. However, I would like to know the possible
standardized mechanisms by which we can take relevant (searching with 
the word 'ethics' in Scientific Commons gets 75000+ records) metadata from
these harvestors and ingest in our database.

Thank you for your time to reflect on this issues.

Regards
Atanu Garai
Globethics.net
International Secretariat
150, route de Ferney
CH-1211 Geneva 2
Switzerland
Tel.: +41 22 791 62 49
Fax: +41 22 710 23 86
Web: www.globethics.net