Dr R. Sanderson wrote:
> I shouldn't respond to such blatant trolling, but heh...
>
> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Casey Durfee wrote:
>> SRU is crap, in my opinion -- overengineered and under-thought,
>> incomprehensible to non-librarians and burdened by the weight of
>> history.
>
> What is so incomprehensible about it?  Is it the fact it uses XML? No?
> Is it the REST like interface? No? Ahh... the extremely familiar but not
> hideously over-complicated and inappropriate (such as SQL, SPARQL or
> XQuery) query language?  That you can just put the URLs into your web
> browser and use XSLT to display the results, rather than requiring M2M
> interfaces?
>
>> The notion that it was designed to be used by all kinds of clients on
>> all
>> kinds of data is irrelevant in my book.  Nobody in the *library
>> world* uses
>> it, much less non-libraries.  APIs are for use.  You don't get any
>> points
>
> Except for, you know, small projects like The European Library (which is
> the template for the nascent European Digital Library), the Library of
> Congress, DSpace, most digital library systems, etc etc etc. And
> IndexData have interfaces to many sources of data via SRU, for when it's
> not natively implemented.
>
>
>> for idealogical correctness.  A non-librarian could look at that API
>> document, understand it all, and start working with it right away.
>> There is
>> no way you can say that about SRU.
>
> I will say it, right now.  I've had non librarian students look at the
> document and start working with it straight away. Multiple times.
> My apologies if you don't have similar experiences.

One of my favorite tricks when explaining networked information
retrieval is still to type SRU queries into a browser and walk through
the XML response. It's the simplest way I know to get the point across
that it is absolutely dead easy to get started using networked IR using
a standard protocol, no matter what programming environment you're in. I
have yet to meet a programmer/librarian/manager who didn't think that
was a cool trick, and who went away with their imagination stimulated to
go do something with it... most people buy into the notion that this
stuff is somehow 'hard', and come away mildly surprised when they
realize that it isn't.

Btw, that practice led to this document:
http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/simple.html which tries to get the same
point across.

--Seb
>> Kudos to the OpenLibrary team, whatever the reason was, for coming up
>> with
>> something better that people outside the library world might actually be
>> willing to use.
>
> It's totally arbitrary JSON with a very small fraction of the
> functionality and at least as much complexity.  If people are willing to
> use it then that's great, certainly.
>
> Rob
>

--
Sebastian Hammer, Index Data
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