announcing gnujake

[Daniel Chudnov]

<pardon xposts/>


Announcing gnujake:  GNU Jointly Administered Knowledge Environment

gnujake seeks to support management of and linking between online
resources and descriptions thereof.  Specifically, gnujake is intended to
help you: 

o figure out which databases index titles you're interested in
o figure out which full-text collections include titles you want to read
o cleanly link from your opac to an ejournal issue list
o connect eresource administration metadata specific to your institution
  to appropriately granular and interlinked title descriptions
o cleanly link from some of your eresources to others
o give patrons a single front-end to your varied full-text collections for
  article searching

... and much, much more!  well, so we hope...


gnujake is GNU because it and its contents and associated code will be out
there for you to use, modify, link to, add to, you name it, with one
caveat:  We have had some preliminary discussions with vendors to verify
that using their title lists is ok with them; we foresee no reason any one
publisher or vendor wouldn't want their lists included.  But it is
possible someone might not.  So for now, the GNU GPL is noticeably absent
from the site.  As the union search and other gnujake services come
online, we will begin at some point to only include such data that is
'approved' for licensing under the GPL.


That said, the project page is at:

  http://www.med.yale.edu/library/oss4lib/projects/gnujake.php3

...and the first working demonstration of gnujake's intended direction is
the gnujake:union search form.  This prototype returns a list of databases
that index a particular title from a list of (currently) 113,000 titles
indexed in 27 databases.  Give it a try: 

  http://www.med.yale.edu/library/gnujake/search.html


gnujake arose from specific needs we had here at Yale:  to cleanly catalog
urls for online titles, to keep administrative metadata about eresources
online, to connect from Ovid citations to non-Ovid full-text articles, to
connect DubMed to full-text articles independent of vendor, and to make it
easier for patrons to get to the things they need.  It seemed obvious that
parts of the systems we were building had nothing to do with our own
institution content- or code-wise, and that some of you out there might
need these same things.  I hope we're right. 


  Enjoy,

  -Dan


Daniel Chudnov
Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
(203) 785-4347