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 en