What we are reading right now…
Under guidance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Digital Library Federation (DLF), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Microsoft, a meeting was held in April 2006 aimed at identifying concrete steps that could be taken to augment interoperability across heterogeneous scholarly repositories. The specific goal of the meeting was to try and reach a common understanding regarding a data model and a limited set of core, protocol-based repository interfaces that would allow services and downstream applications to interact with heterogeneous repositories in a consistent manner. Such repository interfaces include interfaces that support locating, identifying, harvesting, obtaining and depositing compound digital objects.
Access report here: http://msc.mellon.org/Meetings/Interop/FinalReport
The “common understandings” included in the report may be in terms of multiple repositories, but I think we can learn some things, as well as gain some perspectives about the similar needs of a consortial repository…
