[OAI-general] Stargate project conclusions and extension

[R John Robertson]

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit:
Enabling small publishers to participate in OAI-PMH-based services)

(apologies for cross-posting)

In conjunction with four journal publishers, the STARGATE project 
investigated the use of static repositories as a means of exposing 
publisher metadata to OAI-based disclosure, discovery and alerting 
services within the JISC Information Environment and beyond. Our intent 
was to enable smaller publishers to participate in OAI-based services 
without having to implement and maintain an full repository.
The project has demonstrated that static repositories are easy to create 
and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI 
Repositories appear to have little impact on the participation of small 
journal publishers in OAI-based services.

The project's outputs and final report are available from the project 
website http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/stargate/

The outputs are:
Stargate Tools Part 1: Introduction, key issues and relevant technologies
Stargate Tools Part 2: Creating Static Repositories, evaluating this 
method, and case studies
A database tool and associated VB modules
Stargate Tools Part 3: Issues for developing the use of OAI-based 
services by the publishing community

We recommend to the wider community that the use of static repositories 
continues to be explored – in particular as a flexible way to expose 
existing sets of structured information to OAI services.

One of the issues that arose in the project was the apparent lack of a 
static repository gateway with any formal guarantee of availability. If 
data providers are going to use static repositories they depend on a 
third party to run a gateway. To our knowledge all of the existing 
gateways (including ours) operate as research gateways, and, as such, 
they make no promises about service availability.

JISC have funded a brief extension to STARGATE to provide some further 
supporting documentation about the gateway software and other issues 
that would allow a community to assess the commitment required to run a 
gateway and support the use of static repositories.

regards,
John

-- 
R. John Robertson
Researcher/ STARGATE Project Manager
Centre for Digital Library Research
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde, Livingstone Tower
26 Richmond Street, Glasgow, G1 1XH, UK
Tel:	+44 (0) 141 548 5854
Website: http://cdlr.strath.ac.uk/