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On Mar 28, 2006, at 5:33 PM, K.G. Schneider wrote: > Wearing my LII hat (http://lii.org ) I have been approached by a > library--and had suggestions on our user survey--for something I've > wanted > to offer from LII as an added value service (as in, we do it and > you pay for > it) but wasn't able to articulate very well either in execution or in > technology. One survey response that I just read said: > > "Develop web services (accessible by subscription) to allow a > developer to > include some of the LII in an application." Granted, I do not know all the details, and I'm sure I am missing parts of the picture, but that being said I suggest you implement an OAI interface to your content and restrict access to the interface based on IP addresses. Your content is saved in a MySQL database. Cool. You do I/O (input/ output) against the database using a content management system. Fine. Install Perl on your machine and write a program that creates robust OAI XML files using Dublin Core. Save these files to your file system and put them in subdirectories denoting OAI sets. Download and configure (there isn't much installation necessary) a suite of Perl modules called XMLFile. [1] There is really only one file in the suite to edit. Finally, restrict access to the set of OAI files by IP address and let your subscribers harvest your metadata. Once harvested the secondary websites will be able to incorporate your content into their site as they see fit. Alternative approaches/Web services to use might be SRU, RSS, or Amazon's OpenSearch. I would stay away from searching technologies though because they will be a constant drain on your resources. RSS is not necessarily robust enough to adequately describe your content. -- Eric Lease Morgan University Libraries of Notre Dame [1] http://www.dlib.vt.edu/projects/OAI/software/xmlfile/xmlfile.html