As others have suggested I think much of this is around the practicalities
of negotiating access, and the server power & expertise needed to run the
service - simply more efficient to do this in one place.

For me the change that we need to open this up is for publishers to start
pushing out a lot more of this data to all comers, rather than having to
have this conversation several times over with individual sites or
suppliers. How practical this is I'm not sure - especially as we are talking
about indexing full-text where available (I guess). I think the Google News
model (5-clicks free) is an interesting one - but not sure whether this, or
a similar approach, would work in a niche market which may not be so
interested in total traffic.

It seems (to me) obviously in the publishers interest for their content to
be as easily discoverable as possible that I am optimistic they will
gradually become more open to sharing more data that aids this - at least
metadata. I'd hope that this would eventually open up the market to a
broader set of suppliers, as well as institutions doing their own thing.

Owen

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 2:37 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Jun 30, 2010, at 8:43 PM, Blake, Miriam E wrote:
>
> > We have locally loaded records from the ISI databases, INSPEC,
> > BIOSIS, and the Department of Energy (as well as from full-text
> > publishers, but that is another story and system entirely.) Aside
> > from the contracts, I can also attest to the major amount of
> > work it has been. We have 95M bibliographic records, stored in >
> > 75TB of disk, and counting. Its all running on SOLR, with a local
> > interface and the distributed aDORe repository on backend. ~ 2
> > FTE keep it running in production now.
>
>
> I definitely think what is outlined above -- local indexing -- is the way
> to go in the long run. Get the data. Index it. Integrate it into your other
> system. Know that you have it when you change or drop the license. No
> renting of data. And, "We don't need no stinkin' interfaces!" I believe a
> number of European institutions have been doing this for a number of years.
> I hear a few of us in the United States following suit.  ++
>
> --
> Eric Morgan
> University of Notre Dame.
>



-- 
Owen Stephens
Owen Stephens Consulting
Web: http://www.ostephens.com
Email: [log in to unmask]