Diane I. Hillmann writes
> Sadly much of the discussion about what's happened to OAIster lacks
> real understanding about what OAIster represents and what the
> OAI-PMH protocol represents as an alternative distribution system.
I would interested to see where my contributions demonstrate
a lack of real understanding.
> Whether or not the information from OAIster is now available in
> WorldCat or FirstSearch for "free," the loss of OAIster as an openly
> available OAI aggregator represents a huge loss, and not just to
> those sites that depended upon it to help distribute their
> information.
Oh, come on, it's not that big a deal to reproduce an aggregator of
data. You download DOAR, you fire up Tim's harvester the records,
bingo. If I can do it, anybody can. It's bigger deal to produce a
meaningful service because of the inadequate "Dublin Con" metadata
that is used by default. For AuthorClaim, I need to figure out only
four things:
* title easy
* author names easy
* stable id tough
* URL to a description of the resource verrry tough
That I still have to do, but I'd be happy to distribute what I can
come up with.
> What many people don't understand is that OAI-PMH itself is not a
> discovery mechanism, neither indeed, was OAIster.
I am not sure what you mean by "discovery mechanism" here.
> In the OAI world, data providers make their records available to
> data harvesters, and those harvesters make services available to
> users. OAI-PMH is optimized for automated harvesting over time,
> multiple metadata formats, and incremental updating.
The claim that it is "optimized" baffles me. Full disclosure: I was
part of the techncial committee that designed OAI-PMH. I pleaded to
adopt a file based approach. With public rsync, it would have been
lightening-fast. Instead, we have what I think of as a "digital
ritual" that is cumbersome to maintain, and slow to use.
> Among the more common services might be discovery, but discovery was
> by no means the whole story. OAIster aggregated information from
> most of the servers available in the OAI world--in some cases I
> believe they maintained data that was no longer available from its
> original source.
You hit an important point here. Very roughly, from what I can see
with the archives listed in DOAR, something like 60% are up,
about 25% are down (kaputt?) and the rest shake like a cow's tail.
So far about optimality of OAI-PMH.
> Without an aggregation service like OAIster, those who use the
> protocol to build information services must harvest from many
> individual servers, which may be tougher and more difficult to
> maintain.
As I said up there, it's not that big a deal, but I am happy to do
it and share what I have since I have to collect it anyway. Your
implicit claim that it is hard to harvest from OAI-PMH sources is
also in contradiction to your claim that OAI-PMH is "optimized".
> Even for those who preferred to harvest from individual
> sites, OAIster represented a backup source.
Well, when I approached them, they were not eager to share
what they had. I am much more eager to do it. I love resource
sharing. Others are more sceptical, I know.
> I believe this change should be another wake-up call for those who
> believe that having all services run by OCLC is a significant
> impediment to the healthy innovation that the library community
> needs to move forward.
Absolutely. I could not agree more. But we need more sharing,
and more specialization.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
skype: thomaskrichel
Received on Sun Sep 20 2009 - 12:42:17 EDT