[Web4lib] interlibrary cooperation - web content

[Conal Tuohy]

On Tue, 2007-07-31 at 16:00 -0500, Raumin "Ray" Dehghan wrote:
>    I'm working on creating content for our website - links with annotations
> etc.  I'm curious to hear of any experiences of librarians sharing actual
> content - the annotations themselves and the way they are organized.

Have you considered using Institutional Repository software[1] to do
this, Ray?

This kind of software is widely used for archiving and cataloguging
scholarly publications, and though typically such repositories contain
actual content objects (often PDF files and similar), they may also just
be metadata associated with external resources; that is to say,
annotated links. 

A notable feature of this family of software products is their universal
support for the Open Archive Initiative's Protocol for Metadata
Harvesting (OAI-PMH), which they use to exchange this bibliographic (or
webliographic) metadata in Dublin Core format. [2]

Finally there is software available (for example, the open source "PKP
Harvester"[3]) which will aggregate metadata from a number of
repositories and allow it to be browsed and searched, and republished as
RSS and OAI-PMH.[4]

>    This might lend itself to more efficiency and less reinventing of the
> wheel.  This might be similar to the open source movement, which is
> facilitating the sharing of technology - web design etc.

Also cf the "Open Access" movement in scholarly publishing.[5]

Cheers!

Con

1] Institutional repository software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Institutional_repository_software

2] Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/

3] Open Archives Harvester | Public Knowledge Project
http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=harvester

4] Exploiting "Light-weight" Protocols and Open Source Tools to
Implement Digital Library Collections and Services
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october05/morgan/10morgan.html

5] Open access
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access