Ojax
Every repository-rat who reads this needs to check Ojax out now. It’s a federated repository search engine based on OAI. Alpha code, so install at your own risk. (Via OA News.)
I’ve been waiting for something like this. It had to happen. DSpace’s search is wonky as all get-out (try playing with parentheses or other punctuation—apostrophes are fun—to see what I mean), not to mention that each individual installation of DSpace can only search itself.
Consortia whose members run separate repositories (no, I don’t resemble this description at all, why would you think that?) can now search them all together. Anybody and everybody can consider running a mini-OAIster. (I kid. The mere thought of running OAIster gives any self-respecting library geek heartburn.)
When this baby matures a little, I suspect it’ll do something even more exciting—act as a subject-specific aggregator. What it would need to do (speaking from a DSpace-centric perspective) is learn to harvest specific communities and collections from a given repository, ignoring everything else. (I’ll have to refresh my OAI grammar to figure out how that would actually work—some perversion of ListSets, I would think—but it must work. Somehow.) This is the killer app, people. This is arXiv writ large. The sooner we can do it, the better.
I’m not actually installing this one yet; I haven’t the patience for alpha Java code. I am watching it with considerable (not to say ravenous) interest, however, and I hope somebody works out a HOWTO for publishing it next to DSpace (two Tomcat apps together is a groan-worthy prospect, unfortunately) and bypassing DSpace’s wonky search tools in favor of it.
Might even take a crack at that myself, if I get super-ambitious.
(Hm. I played with OAI a bit on the repository I run, and it turns out that ListSets only gives you collections, not communities. That’s sort of a shame. Working as designed, I’m sure, since communities are collections of e-peeps and collections are collections of stuff. Even so, I wonder if OAI allows sets within sets? Let me check… yes, it seems to be allowed, but DSpace doesn’t return sets that way. Weird. I wonder why not.)