I see today that Ebsco announced their "Discovery Service," similar to Summon.  Not surprising, of course -- although note the fact that WorldCat will be included in the "local index", interesting, no?

   http://www.ebscohost.com/thisTopic.php?marketID=1&topicID=1245

Anyway, nothing in the press release mentions an API.  Hopefully folks will impress upon Ebsco the need for such access, as OCLC and Serial Solutions have done for their systems. Ebsco does have an API for their basic platform, so maybe it's just not mentioned.

We've taken to calling these class of systems "super databases," for what it's worth.

--Dave

==================
David Walker
Library Web Services Manager
California State University
http://xerxes.calstate.edu
________________________________________
From: Code for Libraries [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Yitzchak Schaffer [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 10:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Serials Solutions Summon

Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> 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.

This is available as a dump for their traditional holdings product,
which makes it possible to do just this (i.e. use SerSol cleaned
holdings/access info in a local system).  My working with SerSol has
brought me to see them as essentially a great data aggregation service
with some OK software bundled in.  We are looking ahead to possibly
using this technique by loading their data into a local ERMS.

Agreed that such an availability of data would be a great service with
the Summon metadata as well.

--
Yitzchak Schaffer
Systems Manager
Touro College Libraries
33 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
Tel (212) 463-0400 x5230
Fax (212) 627-3197
Email [log in to unmask]
Twitter /torahsyslib