On 17-Mar-05, at 11:29 AM, Mark Jordan wrote: > However, I'm not totally clear on the range of potential uses for the > registry we're all describing, even though several > people have explained what they want for a particular application. For > example, do people want to query a registry and get > back attributes of a database product (vendor, titles indexed, etc.)? > What form would this query take? Do people simply want > to use it as a "name authority" for products to assist collection > development, authorization management, etc.? What I'm looking for is the latter: a control number that could be used to identify when eresources are the "same" (defined as pretty much the same content, regardless of interface). The DLF model described by Peter would be more than adequate for my purposes. I need something like this in order to merge lists of eresources maintained by different organizations. This would be relevant for two of my current projects: 1. A research database gateway for students taking courses from multiple institutions 2. A combined list of resources licensed by several different library consortia Actually it isn't the initial merging of these lists that's so much at issue, as the ongoing maintenance of them as various sites add & drop resources. It would be really nice to be able to automate that. > How would a > registry be maintained? Good question, and it would probably depend on the scale of the project. It would be easy enough to do with a small number of agencies, assuming that the agencies bought into the need for it. Whenever one of the agencies added a resource to their collection they would check the central registry to see if an ID was already there. If it was, they would add it to a field in their local record. If it wasn't already in the list, they would log into the central registry and add an entry for it. This could scale up to a point, but this model probably isn't all that great for more than a few agencies and a few thousand resources. I don't know ... is it possible to do distributed creation of control numbers? To generate a usable ID of the format interface:resource/collection1/collection2 one would need to unambiguously identify the elements so that others could be sure that the control number actually applied to a particular resource. Not entirely sure how to do that, but here are my thoughts so far: The interface could probably be identified by some portion of the URL(s) used to access it, eg you would need to include 'search.epnet.com' as part of the record for EBSCOhost. For CSA Illumina you might need all of http://www.csa.com/csaillumina, since www.csa.com is the vendor's home page, not the interface. To clearly identify the resource, would it be enough to include the title and the publisher (which may or may not be the same as the interface provider) ? Again, this might not scale up past a certain point. If collections were defined as components belonging to a particular resource, then their name would probably be enough to disambiguate them. Does any of this sound like it would be useful to anyone besides me? John -- John Durno Project Coordinator BC Electronic Library Network ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Phone: 604-268-7002 Fax: 604-291-3023 Email: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.eln.bc.ca