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>I'd agree... the nice thing about the WebDAV interface is that is >works with all these backends! Whether SVN, a native XML database, or >a file system... all have WebDAV interfaces. I've been very >interested over the years watching Art (and Ross) experimenting with >WebDAV and catalog records. Have there been any code4lib proposals >along these lines? I'd vote for that. I made a big mistake along the way in trying to work with Voyager's call number setup in Oracle, and dragged Ross along in an attempt to get past Oracle's constant quibbles with rogue characters in call number ranges. The idea was to expose the library catalogue as a series of folders using said call number ranges. This part works well enough when the characters are dealt with, but breaks down a bit for certain formats. For example, the University of Windsor lumps most of its microfiche holdings in one call number with an accession number, and Georgia Tech does something similar with maps. This can mean individual webdav folders with many thousands of entries, and some less than elegant workarounds. Still, to me, the amazing advantage of webdav is that it is already built into windows. There are clients for every major operating system but this is one of the very few examples where a neat technology does not have to be grafted on to windows afterwards. On the other hand, there are some webdav clients, like bitkinex, which open multiple http connections at a time to push through many updates concurrently. The windows default support is a little spartan and sometimes buggy, but at least it's there in a somewhat consistent fashion. There's tremendous interest in clipboard options for the web, webdav is more in the "drag and drop" category. I see it as having the most potential for objects that have inbuilt metadata than for metadata constructs like MARC, but it would be neat to combine it with solr. That would be straight forward to do with cocoon and I suspect with other XML friendly frameworks. art