>I'd agree... the nice thing about the WebDAV interface is that is
>works with all these backends!  Whether SVN, a native XML database, or
>a file system... all have WebDAV interfaces.  I've been very
>interested over the years watching Art (and Ross) experimenting with
>WebDAV and catalog records.  Have there been any code4lib proposals
>along these lines?  I'd vote for that.

I made a big mistake along the way in trying to work with Voyager's call
number setup in Oracle, and dragged Ross along in an attempt to get past
Oracle's constant quibbles with rogue characters in call number ranges.
The idea was to expose the library catalogue as a series of folders using
said call number ranges. This part works well enough when the characters
are dealt with, but breaks down a bit for certain formats. For example,
the University of Windsor lumps most of its microfiche holdings in one
call number with an accession number, and Georgia Tech does something
similar with maps. This can mean individual webdav folders with many
thousands of entries, and some less than elegant workarounds.

Still, to me, the amazing advantage of webdav is that it is already built
into windows. There are clients for every major operating system but this
is one of the very few examples where a neat technology does not have to
be grafted on to windows afterwards. On the other hand, there are some
webdav clients, like bitkinex, which open multiple http connections at a
time to push through many updates concurrently. The windows default
support is a little spartan and sometimes buggy, but at least it's there
in a somewhat consistent fashion.

There's tremendous interest in clipboard options for the web, webdav is
more in the "drag and drop" category. I see it as having the most
potential for objects that have inbuilt metadata than for metadata
constructs like MARC, but it would be neat to combine it with solr. That
would be straight forward to do with cocoon and I suspect with other XML
friendly frameworks.

art