Hi Clay,

> I completely agree with everything you just wrote, especially about
> Atom + APP being more than just a technology for blogs.  APP is a
> great lightweight alternative to WebDAV, and promising for all sorts
> of data transfer.  The fact that it has developer groundswell is a
> huge plus.  During my Princeton days Kevin Clarke and I briefly
> talked about what a METS + APP metadata editing application could
> do.  (I can't remember the answer, but I bet it would be snazzy.)

On the one side you are right: Atom + APP is becoming popular and the
standards are good, so digital libraries should get into it. On the
other side I was just reminded to the ECDL2006-paper "Repository
Replication Using NNTP and SMTP": You can almost use any protocol (HTTP,
OAI, ATOM APP, WebDAV, NNTP...) for most of digital libraries' use cases
- but the best standard without approriate tools and support is pretty
worthless.

> I came to this realization out of frustration that most OAI toolkits
> (at the time, ca. 2005) didn't support that functionality well -- or
> at all.  I don't know if that's still the case.  However, the need to
> delete records is a reality for most projects, and OAI has somewhat
> awkwardly made us rethink how to "delete" a record in repositories
> and the like, both on the service and data provider end.   You almost
> have to build your entire system around handling "deleted" records
> just for OAI exposure.   In reality it seems like you just end up
> masquerading or re-representing its outward visibility on our local
> systems, which gets onerous.
>
> I guess the difference is that the growing number of Atom developers
> are heeding the requirement for deletions, whereas the few existing
> OAI toolkit developers have deemed that functionality as optional.

Most repositories do not even track deletions so they cannot syndicate
them. If OAI-delete was mandatory, maybe OAI-PMH had not been used that
much? OAI did a good job in promoting and documenting OAI-PMH but
deletions were always treated as an orphan - I would not blame the
standard but the lacking implementation.

Also ATOM and RFC 5005 is not much better than other solutions - but its
much more likely to get it implemented in Weblog and other software then
OAI which is not that known outside the library world.

Greetings,
Jakob

P.S: Maybe we would all be happy with Z39.50 if we had that wonderful
Indexdata tools right from the beginning - instead there were only
closed source specifications and different closed source partial
implementations. A standard without easy to use open source
implementations is condemned to be violated and die.


--
Jakob Voß <[log in to unmask]>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de