Karen Schneider wrote:
>> But I don't think I was clear with my question in any case; it occurs to me
>> now that my true question wasn't code-related, but seeing Summon on the conf
>> agenda prompted me to bring it up here.  Namely: has anyone investigated
>> whether the arrangements SerSol has with content vendors are easily
>> duplicable by institutions for home-baked/potential OSS products
>>
>>     
> It's a relationship, so anything is possible. But "easily"? That would
> depend on who was doing it.
>   

I think in point of fact SerialSolution is doing a LOT of work to keep 
the feeds from the vendors flowing, keep the data updated, deal with 
errors, normalize it to some extent so it can all live in an index 
together.

It's good SerialSolutions has set the precedent, so it may be possible 
for other entities to duplicate those relationships. (I am VERY curious 
about whether SerSol is paying publishers for metadata or getting it for 
free).  But unless you are a large consortium, I think it's going to be 
more cost effective to pay SerSol (or another vendor) to wrangle all 
that metadata, than to try and do it yourself.

It _would_ be great if SerSol would actually give you (if you were 
subscribed) a feed of their harvested and normalized metadata, so you 
could still pay them to collect and normalize it, but then use it for 
your own purposes outside of Summon. I hope SerSol will consider this 
down the line, if Summon is succesful.

Jonathan