[OAI-implementers] User Specific Archive Access

[Michael Krot]

Hi.

I am in the beginning stages of architecting an implementation of OAI 
that will provide user-specific access to our archives and was wondering 
if anyone knew of any other projects that have tackled this issue.

As far as background information, we are an archive with about 400 
journal titles and millions of records.  Users will only be able to 
harvest metadata for those journals that they have subscribed to - that 
should be a problem I can handle.  Things get tricky when we start to 
look at what is available WITHIN the journal.  Some users will have 
access to the entire journal from start to finish, other users will only 
have access to records up until a certain year (usually 5 years before 
the present year).  This isn't so hard to manage either, until you start 
to think about a user asking for new or changed content.  What is "new" 
or changed will be different for each harvester, depending on their 
access rights.

One possible solution to this problem is to simply give them the 
metadata and flag it as being unavailable in some way, but this is not 
an ideal solution.  An ideal solution is to restrict access to the 
metadata until such time as they are permitted to harvest it.

Well, I don't expect anyone else to have encountered this specific 
problem, but if anyone has experimented with limiting access to an 
archive for specific users or user-groups, I would love to know about it.

Thanks!
Michael Krot  
Data Manager
JSTOR