It is possible for a consortium to build the same sort of service as Serials Solutions.  Besides the OhioLink example, we've been doing that in Ontario for the last 7 years or so - aggregating ejournal content (15 million articles), abstract and index databases (over 100 now in partnership with Proquest), ebooks (about 50,000 commercial ebooks and 170,000 plus digitized ebooks from the Open Content Alliance).  It is a significant effort to deal with all the data feeds but as publishers migrate their production processes to XML we're finding that it is getting a little easier each year.  We aggregate everything in a single XML database from a company called MarkLogic.  The biggest issues we struggle with are currency - it's never as fast as the publisher site though it isn't far behind when things are working well - and quality control - the publisher production processes are shifting to XML but the quality of the data varies.  But hey, it's a library, and these are age-old issues present even in the print world.

Alan


On 4/21/09 2:13 PM, "Jonathan Rochkind" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Peter Murray wrote:
> I don't think it is part of SerSol's business model to offer a feed of
> the full metadata it aggregates, but it does seem to be part of the
> business model to offer an API upon which you could put your own
> interface to the underlying aggregated data.
>

Yep, it's not presently, but I'm hoping that in the future they expand
to that business model as well.  I think it's feasible.

An API on which you can act on their index is great.  But actually
having the data to re-index yourself in exactly the way you wanted would
give you even more power (if you wanted to do the more work to get it).
And would still be worth paying SerSol for, for the work of aggregating
and normalizing the data.

Jonathan