Eric, et al,

I have been thinking of ways, similiar to what you have done that you
mentioned below with the Ockham project, to allow more modern day access
with our library catalog.  I have been beginning to think about devising
a way to index/harvest our entire catalog (and allow this indexing
process to run every so often) to allow our own custom access methods.
We could then generate our own custom RSS feeds of new books, allow more
efficient/enticing search interfaces, etc.

Do you know of any existing software for indexing or harvesting a
catalog into another datastore (SQL Database, XML Database, etc).  I am
sure I could fetch all of the records somehow through Z39.50 and dump it
into a MySQL database, but maybe there is some better method?

Thanks!
Andrew

Eric Lease Morgan wrote:

> [Please excuse the cross-posting.]
>
> Thanks to the GREAT work of Xiaorong Xiang (a Ph.D student here at
> Notre Dame in Computer Science), we have all but finished the
> development work on [log in to unmask] See:
>
>   http://mylibrary.ockham.org/
>
> MyLibrary@Ockham uses MyLibrary to collect, organize, and cache more
> than 430,000 records harvested from various scholarly OAI archives.
> The system then uses reports written against the database to find
> things like all the items classified as articles or all the items
> classified as medicine. These reports are sent to an indexer
> (Plucene), and finally an SRU interface was created allowing people
> to search the index. The SRU interface sports a number of cool
> features including:
>
>   * lists of suggested alternative spellings with ASPELL
>   * lists of possible synonyms using WordNet
>   * lists of statistically created keyword
>
> The point of all this work is three-fold:
>
>   1) to demonstrate how digital library collections
>      and services can be easily implemented using
>      standard protocols and open source software
>
>   2) to address the perennial problem of "finding
>      more like this one"
>
>   3) to demonstrate how the library profession can
>      collect, organize, archive, and disseminate
>      scholarly content if it is published using
>      open access publishing techniques
>
> For more information about the system as well as to see how the
> content is organized, see:
>
>   http://mylibrary.ockham.org/?cmd=about
>   http://mylibrary.ockham.org/?cmd=facets
>
> Fun!
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame