Crossref Technical Meeting* The Charles Hotel, Cambridge, MA Monday, November 9th, 2009 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm Please register today! We also encourage you to register for our 10th Anniversary Celebration Dinner, which will take place Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 6:30 pm following the Crossref Technical Meeting at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. Transportation from the Charles Hotel to the Museum of Science will be provided.

OK, so this has nothing to do with any Crossref projects- but there is an interesting new PRC report out by Mark Ware in which he explores how SMEs (small/medium-sized enterprises) make use of scholarly articles and whether the scholarly publishing industry is doing anything to make their lives easier. This is a topic that is close to my heart.

We are looking to hire an R&D Developer in our Oxford offices. We are look for somebody who: Is passionate about creating tools for online scholarly communication. Relishes working with metadata. Has experience delivering web-based applications using agile methodologies. Wants to learn new skills and work with a variety of programming languages. Enjoys working with a small, geographically dispersed team. Groks mixed-content model XML.

Allen Renear and Carole Palmer have just published an article titled “Strategic Reading, Ontologies, and the Future of Scientific Publishing” in the current issue of Science (http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1157784). I’m particularly happy to see this paper published because I actually got to witness the genesis of these ideas in my living room back in 2006.

In an earlier post I talked about using the PAM (PRISM Aggregator Message) schema for an SRU result set. I have also noted in another post that a Search Web Service could support both SRU and OpenSearch interfaces. This does then beg the question of what a corresponding OpenSearch result set might look like for such a record.

As posted here on the SRU Implementors list, the OASIS Search Web Services Technical Committee has announced the release of drafts of SRU and CQL version 2.0: sru-2-0-draft.doc cql-2-0-draft.doc The Committee is soliciting feedback on these two documents. Comments should be posted to the SRU list by August 13.

A new version of our OpenURL resolver was deployed July 2 which should handle higher traffic (e.g. we have re-enable the LibX plug-in ) Unfortunately there were a few hick ups with the new version which I believe are now corrected (a character encoding bug and a XML structure translation problem). Sorry for any inconvenience.

There’s a new XMP Primer (PDF) by Ron Roskiewicz (ed. Dianne Kennedy) available from XMP-Open. This is copyrighted 2008 but I only just saw this now. This is a 43 page document which provides a very gentle introduction to metadata and labelling of media and then introduces XMP into the content lifecycle and talks to the business case for using XMP.

[ Update - 2009.06.07: As pointed out by Todd Carpenter of NISO (see comments below) the phrase “ SRU by contrast is an initiative to update Z39.50 for the Web ” is inaccurate.

We just registered in the SRU (Search and Retrieve by URL) search registry the following components: Context Sets PRISM Context Set version 2.0 PRISM Context Set version 2.1 Schemas PRISM Aggregator Message Record Schema Version 2.0 PRISM Aggregator Message Record Schema Version 2.1 This means that an SRU (Search and Retrieve by URL) search engine that supported one of the PRISM context sets

(Click image to enlarge graphic.) While the OASIS Search Web Services TC is currently working towards reconciling SRU and OpenSearch, I thought it would be useful to share here a simple graphic outlining how a search web service for structured search might be architected.