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Hi Clay, > I completely agree with everything you just wrote, especially about > Atom + APP being more than just a technology for blogs. APP is a > great lightweight alternative to WebDAV, and promising for all sorts > of data transfer. The fact that it has developer groundswell is a > huge plus. During my Princeton days Kevin Clarke and I briefly > talked about what a METS + APP metadata editing application could > do. (I can't remember the answer, but I bet it would be snazzy.) On the one side you are right: Atom + APP is becoming popular and the standards are good, so digital libraries should get into it. On the other side I was just reminded to the ECDL2006-paper "Repository Replication Using NNTP and SMTP": You can almost use any protocol (HTTP, OAI, ATOM APP, WebDAV, NNTP...) for most of digital libraries' use cases - but the best standard without approriate tools and support is pretty worthless. > I came to this realization out of frustration that most OAI toolkits > (at the time, ca. 2005) didn't support that functionality well -- or > at all. I don't know if that's still the case. However, the need to > delete records is a reality for most projects, and OAI has somewhat > awkwardly made us rethink how to "delete" a record in repositories > and the like, both on the service and data provider end. You almost > have to build your entire system around handling "deleted" records > just for OAI exposure. In reality it seems like you just end up > masquerading or re-representing its outward visibility on our local > systems, which gets onerous. > > I guess the difference is that the growing number of Atom developers > are heeding the requirement for deletions, whereas the few existing > OAI toolkit developers have deemed that functionality as optional. Most repositories do not even track deletions so they cannot syndicate them. If OAI-delete was mandatory, maybe OAI-PMH had not been used that much? OAI did a good job in promoting and documenting OAI-PMH but deletions were always treated as an orphan - I would not blame the standard but the lacking implementation. Also ATOM and RFC 5005 is not much better than other solutions - but its much more likely to get it implemented in Weblog and other software then OAI which is not that known outside the library world. Greetings, Jakob P.S: Maybe we would all be happy with Z39.50 if we had that wonderful Indexdata tools right from the beginning - instead there were only closed source specifications and different closed source partial implementations. A standard without easy to use open source implementations is condemned to be violated and die. -- Jakob Voß <[log in to unmask]>, skype: nichtich Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany +49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de