EDEN
Mark Leggott, University Librarian at the University of Winnipeg, makes an excellent proposal:
An EDEN Alternative - Electronic Document Exchange Network
I would propose that the ILL community define an open protocol for exchanging ILL documents as an alternative to proprietary system like Ariel. I understand that OCLC has developed a protocol for their ILLiad system called Odyssey, unfortunately I couldn’t find a great deal of detailed information on their site. William did provide a link in his blog post to a PDF document which does describe the basic calls in the Odyssey system. Unfortunately, I’m not sure this provides what we need to build a robust open system. Once we determine an appropriate exchange protocol (Odyssey or something else), I think the rest will be easy. A scenario to get to EDEN could look like something like the following.
- Delay moving to Ariel 4. All Ariel sites would maintain their current installations, which hopefully means 3.4 or less. Institutions that have upgraded to 4.0 already should consider the option of rolling back to 3.x. The University of Winnipeg recently moved to a new PC for our Ariel system, installed 3.4 but experienced a few problems, so we went back to 3.3. It has been working just fine.
- Develop a protocol for EDEN. I would suggest basing the system on WebDAV, as it will provide all the functions required to submit, retrieve and delete documents - either manually or automated. This means building support in existing ILL systems for EDEN would be much simplified. It would also facilitate a remote EDEN repository for institutions too small to implement their own WebDAV systems. Having said that, any institution with a Web server should be able to implement a WebDAV service for use with an in-house or vendor-based document exchange system. All that would be needed is agreement on a standard way to describe the documents (e.g. file name or associated XML metadata).
- With a system like WebDAV an institution could build their own document send/receive function in about 20 minutes using standard tools. For example, I could scan a PDF document, deposit it on a WebDAV server and also retrieve a document deposited by someone else, using tools built-in to my operating system (OS X). With a little additional time I could create scripts to automate a lot of this and integrate with my OpenILL system. The important thing to bear in mind here is that all institutions have the tools they would need to send/receive documents in a WebDAV repository. Thoe with ILL systems could encourage their vendors to support the EDEN protocol.
I would be happy to work with any groups or individuals interested in making EDEN a reality. It would be a shame with all the disruption coming down the pike with Ariel upgrades to not take the opportunity to do it right this time. The COPPUL consortium is currently discussing options for moving to a more functional document exchange environment, including striking a small working group on this issue. Please contact me (m.leggott [at] uwinnipeg.ca) if you know of similar initiatives/protocols, or would like to continue to discuss an EDEN initiative.
Great points and I fully support it. Those going to ALA this weekend have the ball in their court.