Developing Seamless Discovery of Scholarly and Trade Journal Resources Via OAI and RSS

The usefulness of online information such as e-publishing and timely notification on the latest scientific or professional news has been widely accepted. However, access to such valuable information is often limited by lack of mechanisms for interoperability and distributed harvesting of the source databases. Following recent experiments at EEVL (Internet Guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing [1]), we have shown that emergent web-based technology can effectively and positively impact on access to this online information. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) [2] is one major effort to address technical interoperability among distributed sources of information. The objective of OAI is to provide a framework to facilitate the discovery of content in distributed archives. RSS [3] is another XML-based format for sharing data on the web. This paper discusses two areas of current development at EEVL. The first is a project to set up a seamless access mechanism based on OAI for an important publisher of scientific journals; the second is a project to release metadata from a consortium of engineering trade information publishers using RSS. Outcomes will include metadata ready to be embedded in various subject-based or institutional portal services, including a bibliographic crosssearch service, and 'one-step' aggregated engineering trade news, jobs and conference services.