Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
>>
>> I agree with this, but I think it's important to recall that Summon is
>> designed to be the whole enchilada--not just an invisible middle man
>> supporting a variety of user interfaces. I believe their strategy is to
>> market the whole experience, soup to nuts, including the library's MARC
>> data. I frankly can't imagine that they'd be all that interested in
>> providing data only to other services, but it's certainly worth asking.
>>
>
> In a departure from Serial Solutions typical business model, the
> Summon front-end will be provided as open source software, and the
> customer will be free to swap out the front-end for any other
> hypothetical front-end, using the same Summon APIs that the "out of
> the box" (open source) front-end uses.
>
> So Serial Solutions is already behaving a bit differently than usual,
> and is already open to the underlying service being displayed in other
> contexts through software not their own.
Yes, the ability to create your on interfaces using the API is great.
Not having seen the API, I'm not sure how well it will work, but I can
see great potential assuming Serial Solutions provides a fairly easy to
use, well documented API.
>
> But they as of yet have no plans to provide the _data_ to be reindexed
> in your own index, as opposed to access to an underlying API to access
> SS's index. In addition to potential worries about de-valuing their
> own service, there are technical challenges to providing a data service.
While there certainly are technical changes of provided > 400,000 items
(most in full text) for people to re-index on there own, I bet an even
bigger issue is getting the publishers who are providing Serials
Solutions the content to agree to this. In the arrangement they have
now, publishers only have to worry about one entity, that they have a
directly legally binding agreement with, using the data as agreed upon.
I think even without any technical issues and Serials Solutions being
completely willing to provide data for individuals to re-index, this is
a non sequitur because I doubt the publishers would agree, and if they
did, the costs would be so astronomically high, that [almost] no library
would be able to purchase it.
Edward
Received on Thu Jun 18 2009 - 10:25:08 EDT