Thanks, Chad, it does help. And I think it helps me understand why I was 
a bit confused by the suggestion, but let me see if I've gotten it:

I asked about COinS. COinS (drat, hate uplow, from now on just coins) is 
basically just a formatted string imbedded in the html that will be used 
by an external program. There is no service that the OL site needs to 
provide other than popping the context object in there in the right 
format. Very low effort, from the open library's point of view.

unAPI appears to require some lightweight services that would have to be 
added to the OL site: basically, responding to the three possible unapi 
requests. So we can't *just* add an unAPI to the html pages -- there's a 
bit more work that needs to be done.

Is this correct?

Thanks,
kc

Chad Fennell wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2008, at 4:21 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
>> I've looked at unAPI, but I can't get a handle on what needs to be in 
>> the <abbr>. What would be useful?
>>
>> kc
>>
>
>
> I put together a pretty basic unAPI interface (technically, a Drupal 
> module) for our EthicShare project; you can see how the <abbr> tags 
> are used there.  Ex:
>
> http://ethicshare.org/publications/ethics?sc=publications
>
> embedded on the page, you'll find things like: <abbr class='unapi-id' 
> title='http://ethicshare.org/unapi/374360'>
>
> There are a few other pieces, but you can see these in action there as 
> well.  Ex,
>
> http://ethicshare.org/unapi/ -tells clients what formats are available 
> on the sever - I've only implemented RIS so far...
>
> http://ethicshare.org/unapi/?id=374360 - tells the client what formats 
> are available for a given resource.
>
> http://ethicshare.org/unapi/?id=374360&format=ris - kind of 
> self-explanatory.
>
>
> Hope that helps a little...
>
> Cheers,
> -Chad
>
>


-- 
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
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