>It's not just EAD though. There's no restriction in SRW that you can't
>use it for only short metadata records... Imagine someone with (say) full
>text journal articles. Or full texts of entire books. Or SVG even?
>Search through complex structures and return instances of circles. (or
>whatever SVG primitives are like)
But is this a real application? Would someone really put up an SRW server which when I search for Shakespeare would return the full-text of books which mention Shakespeare? As a user I would expect the server to return a more sensible unit (such as paragraph/chapter/sentence) or else I'm going to have to do free-text searching on the data I get back! Or to get back metadata about the books with links to the free text.
>you just use
>XPath at the server... the server that is supposed to know its own data.
But in the example you quote the data I really need to use some free-text searching in the XPath specification i.e. the XPath might be
/paragraph[free-text-search("Shakespeare")]
At which point I might as well just use XPath to search the entire database and skip SRW!
>That's another question, certainly, but the current one remains and
>applies to non EAD-like structures as well. You wouldn't expect a book to
>be broken down arbitrarily into paragraphs just to make it easier to
>return them individually...
If I'm interested in sections which mention Shakespeare then yes! otherwise SRW is useless for my search requirement! If I'm interested in books about Shakespeare then I'd probably expect more traditional OPAC metadata about the books with links to free-text versions - or at least give me the option of not getting full text by asking for dc/mods etc. (or perhaps do both by supporting record schemas for dc/mods and full-text/paragraphs
Matthew
