[OAI-implementers] Are URL parameters identifying an OAI repository valid?

[Gary McGath]

Osisek, Eric wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> We are building an application which can have multiple OAI repositories
> accessible through the same Java Servelet, and are looking for a way to
> differentiate between them.  Our current thought is to pass a GET
> parameter in the URL to the Servelet indicating which OAI repository to
> access, but I wanted to confirm that this wouldn't get mixed up in the
> OAI parameters and thus result in invalid repositories.  Our plan would
> result in URLs similar to the following  for two distinct OAI
> repositories:
> 
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=1
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=2
> 
> Requests to these repositories would then look like this:
> 
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=1&verb=identify
> http://www.domain.com/oai?id=2&verb=identify

I can't see anything in the OAI-PMH spec that excludes URL parameters 
other than those which the protocol knows about, but some clients might 
have trouble providing such URLs.

Is there a reason why you don't want to treat these as sets?


-- 
Gary McGath
Digital Library Software Engineer
Harvard University Libraries, Office for Information Systems