Yacy as a distributed OA search [was: AW: Special OAIster Announcement from OCLC]

From: Hauschke, Christian <Christian.Hauschke_at_nyob>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:57:13 +0200
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Hi!

A lot of people don't seem to be very happy with OCLCs decision on
OAIster. There's a general problem with centralized services like
OAIster. Too much can happen to that single service, and if it's down
it's down. That's why I thought about a distributed OA search for some
time now and the OAIster decision gave reason to me to ask the YaCy [1]
developer Michael Christen if YaCy could be used for such a search. To
make it short: he's quite optimistic.

Right now YaCy is not able to import data via OAI-PMH but that should be
possible to realize. Of course there's still some work to be done, for
example the proper implementation of dublin core. On page 2 of
<http://yacy.net/material/YaCy_LT2009_Flyer_216x303.pdf> (in German) you
can find an example of the current possibilities of YaCy with dublin
core. BTW: It's SRU compliant.

We'd like to set up a Yacy instance as a proof of concept. In future it
should be possible to cluster some of these instances to a large network
of open access search engines. Just to mention the name of this mailing
list: kind of a "next generation catalog for libraries", I guess.

Opinions, anyone? Do you think a distributed OA search could be useful?

Christian


[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy>

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Received on Thu Sep 24 2009 - 06:58:29 EDT