Open Access to 10,000 Databases
Thanks to Roy Tennant for the heads up on this.
Index Data, WebFeat, and CARE Affiliates have partnered to provide SRU and Z39.50 searching of the 9,000 plus databases for which WebFeat have developed connectors. They are calling this ‘product’ OpenTranslators™. By adding the many databases Index Data already make available, subscribers will be able gain possible access to over 10,000.
From the press release:
OpenTranslators will allow libraries to use the federated search interface of their choice to access over 10,000 databases using SRU/SRW/Z39.50. The databases consist of: licensed databases, free databases, catalogs, Z39.50, Telnet and proprietary databases.
As Index Data’s Sebastian Hammer says in an email posting to Z39.50 Next Generation (ZNG) list:
I’m thrilled about this offering. Pushing content providers to support standards has long been an uphill battle; for many of the small, but interesting database providers, it simply isn’t possible. This technology allows us to dynamically search these resources, through whatever user interface we can imagine, without having to worry about building and maintaining complex gateways for each database. We will continue to encourage database providers to support standards, but in the meanwhile, this service provides a migration path — a way to start building new, exciting interfaces *today*. It is our hope that this in turn will lead to more interest in standards, and more database providers actively supporting this.
As Roy says:
In on stroke, they have made all of these sources available for searching by any application that can work with one of these protocols. All that is required is to contact CARE Affiliates, let them know what sources you want to search and they will provide a quote.
This new service increased the scope for those looking to add databases to their metasearch tools.
Using the name OpenTranslators for this subscription product from CARE Affiliates attracted some questioning about how ‘open’ it is. CARE’s Carl Grant answered most of these points in his blog reply. In summary he says that the ‘open’ is referring to the standards (Z39.50 & SRU) that you use to access the connectors and not the service or the software behind it.
Fair enough - at least we now can subscribe to a service which gives you a consistent search protocol across so many databases. A significant step forward, along the much longer road of providing real open access to open data.
