Karen Schneider wrote:
But I don't think I was clear with my question in any case; it occurs to me
now that my true question wasn't code-related, but seeing Summon on the conf
agenda prompted me to bring it up here. Namely: has anyone investigated
whether the arrangements SerSol has with content vendors are easily
duplicable by institutions for home-baked/potential OSS products
It's a relationship, so anything is possible. But "easily"? That would
depend on who was doing it.
I think in point of fact SerialSolution is doing a LOT of work to keep
the feeds from the vendors flowing, keep the data updated, deal with
errors, normalize it to some extent so it can all live in an index
together.
It's good SerialSolutions has set the precedent, so it may be possible
for other entities to duplicate those relationships. (I am VERY curious
about whether SerSol is paying publishers for metadata or getting it for
free). But unless you are a large consortium, I think it's going to be
more cost effective to pay SerSol (or another vendor) to wrangle all
that metadata, than to try and do it yourself.
It _would_ be great if SerSol would actually give you (if you were
subscribed) a feed of their harvested and normalized metadata, so you
could still pay them to collect and normalize it, but then use it for
your own purposes outside of Summon. I hope SerSol will consider this
down the line, if Summon is succesful.
Jonathan
