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(Please excuse the cross-postings.)

While I am tooting my own horn here, and recording it in mailing list
archives for posterity, the folks at Ariadne have published an article
I wrote called "An Introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL Service
(SRU)". From the article:

   This article is an introduction to the "brother and
   sister" Web Service protocols named Search/Retrieve Web
   Service (SRW) and Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU) with
   an emphasis on the later. More specifically, the article
   outlines the problems SRW/U are intended to solve, the
   similarities and differences between SRW and SRU, the
   complimentary nature of the protocols with OAI-PMH, and
   how SRU is being employed in a sponsored NSF (National
   Science Foundation) grant called OCKHAM to facilitate an
   alerting service. The article is seasoned with a bit of
   XML and Perl code to illustrate the points. If index
   providers were to expose their services via SRW and/or
   SRU, then the content of the 'hidden Web' would become
   more accessible and there would be less of a need to
   constantly re-invent the interfaces to these indexes.

   http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/morgan/


I think these Web Service protocols, SRW/U, hold A LOT of promise for
searching the "hidden Web". I think it behooves us folks in Library
Land to implement these protocols against locally developed,
Internet-accessible indexes. Since the stuff returned from queries
against SRW/U implementations are pure XML it is much easier to reuse
this stuff for many and varied purposes. Display. Storage. Syndication.
Meta searching. Etc.

"Just give me the data!"

--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame