Book People Archive

Re: Open Archives Initiative

dean@[redacted] wrote:
> As for the "librarian/bookfinder like napster", I'd recommend that
> anyone on this list who runs a significant repository take a good look
> at the Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org). It's not,
> strictly speaking, peer-to-peer, but it is a protocol that you could
> certainly build a "distributed book search" capability on top of. All we
> need is for all the repositories to implement the protocol on top of
> their metadata databases and then register.

Let me re-echo Dean Krafft's recommendation of the Open Archives Initiative,
particularly for larger, established repositories. 

We recently registered an archive of the books published by A Celebration
of Women Writers with the Open Archives initiative.  The archive
includes metadata for all 143 on-line books published by the Celebration
(such as those completed by Build-A-Book volunteers, and those prepared
by Mary).  Using the protocol, for instance, automatic crawlers looking
for new releases from the Celebration can easily discover that the
Celebration has just released Mrs. Gatty's _Parables From Nature_, and
can pick up a formatted catalog record for inclusion in appropriate indexes.

It's also possible for archives to define distinguished
sets of records, for indexers that are only interested in certain
types of material.  For instance, an archive that provided
on-line books, journal articles, and sheet music, could define
sets for each of these types of electronic works, so that indexers
just looking for books could pick those up, and those that were
looking for music could find those.  One can also define sets
for particular subject areas, or whatever other criteria seem useful.

One reason I'm particularly interested in this, of course, is that
books are going on-line faster than ever (pat yourselves on the back,
all of you producers of on-line books)! In order to keep up with
all of what's becoming available, I'm going to have to increasingly
rely on automated tools for building and maintaining The On-Line Books
Page.  I'm gradually upgrading my databases and software-- the Celebration's
new Open Archive, and the new author search features some of you may
have noticed on the Celebration, represent the first
stage of these upgrades--  and hope to be able to automatically load
and index records from some well-established and trusted projects
before long.  If such projects distribute their records via OAI,
this provides an easy way for me to get what I need-- as well as
a way that they can quickly get their new additions indexed on
The On-Line Books Page.
             
If any maintainers of on-line book archives are interested in participating
in the Open Archives Initiative, I'll be happy to answer questions
about what's involved.  There's still a fair bit of coding and setup
that one needs to do to participate, so it may be more work than
smaller projects have the time for, but I hope that as the
initiative progresses there will be more software tools available
to make participation easier.

John