Using OAI and other light-weight protocols to facilitate scholarly communication

This presentation describes how we share and harvest sets of various OAI metadata, repurpose it through the Ockham Library Network, and demonstrate an alternative to traditional scholarly communication. The Ockham Library Network is a sponsored National Science Foundation Digital Library grant with co-PI's at Emory University, Virginia Tech, Oregon State University, and the University of Notre Dame. One of the purposes of Ockham is to exploit modular, light-weight protocols (such as OAI-PMH and SRW/U) into systems for learning, teaching, and scholarship. To date we have implemented a number of such services: * Ockham Digital Library Services Registry - A distributed directory of digital library services, collections, and agents. The contents of the Registry are described using the same XML schema articulated by the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR), and the records are shared among participating institutions on a peer-to-peer network utilizing OAI to propagate registry records amongst the distributed nodes. * Find Similar Service - An index of selected OAI-accessible content supplemented with an additional "find more like this one" function. This system first harvests OAI content and saves it to an underlying database. Searches against the database are supplemented with alternative search strategies and the means to finding similar items through semantic and statistical analysis. * MyLibrary@Ockham - A process for doing metadata re-mediation. MyLibrary is an open source database application used to store data about any information resource. It's database structure is rooted in Dublin Core and enhanced with a facet/term approach to classification. As OAI content is harvested from repositories, it can be automatically classified with these facets/terms, and saved to the underlying database. Thus, reports written against MyLibrary can not only be keyed on Dublin Core elements but also on any of the locally facet/term combinations. Such a process enhances and amalgamates OAI-accessible content. * Ockham Alert - A current awareness service. This system regularly harvests data from the National Science foundation OAI Repository, indexes it, and provides an SRU interface to the index. The XML resulting from searches is returned to the user as HTML, RSS, or email. Since new data is added daily and data older than three months is daily removed, repeated queries to the index return a changing set of results facilitating a "What's new?" service against an OAI repository. * Harvest-to-Query (H2Q) - A software appliance for collecting OAI content and providing a Z39.50/SRU/SRW interface to the collection. H2Q allows content providers and content users to easily create query-accessible collections for use with federated search tools and other information retrieval systems. The purpose of this particular implementation is not only to demonstrate what the software/protocol can do, but also how OAI and open access publishing can provide an alternative to the traditional scholarly communication model. If scholars publish electronically, then librarians can collect, organize, archive, and disseminate this scholarly material. In other words, by working together both librarians and scholars can facilitate the scholarly communication process