Responding to Roy's interesting suggesting and being mindful of Walter's/Cliff's cautions, my tale of woe in the hard-copy world was always wanting a way to get at that "In Brief" stuff without having to eyeball the journal. Today, online "In Brief" notices still need to be found efficiently by some of us for various reasons. Anything that improves retrieval of these smaller items would be welcomed by me. You are correct, Walter, that the best federated search results are those resulting from standards-based procedures; but I like Roy's idea, too, for the other, smaller stuff. Back to lurking now. Din. Donna Dinberg Systems Librarian/Analyst Virtual Reference Canada Library and Archives Canada Ottawa, ON K1A 0N4 Voice: 613-995-9227 E-mail: [log in to unmask] <Opinions all mine, of course. Usual disclaimers apply.> > -----Original Message----- > From: Walter Lewis [mailto:[log in to unmask]] > Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 7:18 PM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] index of open access journals > > > Roy Tennant wrote: > > > [snip] There may be other ways to leverage more information out of > > what we're indexing. For example, a number of journals have > sections, > > such as "In Brief" from D-Lib Magazine [snip] It would of > course take > > more work to both setup and maintain, > > but the result would be better. > > I am reminded of a piece of advice Cliff Lynch offered at an > Access conference I attended in the early days of the web > ('95 in Fredericton) where he talked about the fundamental > fragility of programs that supplied web content by screen > scraping vt100 interfaces. <snip> < The best federated search > results, IMHO, hang on standard search and result protocols > like Z39.50 where the underlying structure is abstracted into > standardized access points and published record syntax.