Yes, that's correct.

However, if you already offer persistent URLs for item data in one or 
more machine-readable formats (like MARC, or DC in XML), the additional 
work that needs to be done is likely just a fairly small amount of 
'glue' to make those alternate formats discoverable via unAPI.  As other 
machine-readable formats are made available in the future, they can be 
incorporated into the unAPI "glue" advertising them as well.  unAPI 
makes no requirements about _which_ machine-readable formats are made 
available, it's just a way of advertising their association, basically.

Jonathan

Karen Coyle wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu