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SRU is crap, in my opinion -- overengineered and under-thought, incomprehensible to non-librarians and burdened by the weight of history. The notion that it was designed to be used by all kinds of clients on all kinds of data is irrelevant in my book. Nobody in the *library world* uses it, much less non-libraries. APIs are for use. You don't get any points for idealogical correctness. A non-librarian could look at that API document, understand it all, and start working with it right away. There is no way you can say that about SRU. Kudos to the OpenLibrary team, whatever the reason was, for coming up with something better that people outside the library world might actually be willing to use. On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 12:55 PM, Dr R. Sanderson <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > I'm the only non-techie on the team, so I don't know that much about > > SRU. (Our head programmer lives in India, and is presumably asleep at > > the moment, otherwise I'd ask him!) Is it an interface that is used > > primarily by libraries? We are definitely hoping that our API will be > > used by all kinds, so perhaps that's the reasoning. > > > > It's designed to be used by all kinds of clients on all kinds of data, > but is from the library world so perhaps the most well defined use cases > are in this arena. Have a look at: > http://www.loc.gov/standards/sru/ > > But this is an Open Source project, so if anyone would like to volunteer > > to build an SRU interface... you can! Please do! :-) > > > > I feel a student project coming on. :) > > Rob >