In terms of OAI, Herbert and co at Los Alamos have done interesting work in returning MPEG21/DIDL documents as the "metadata" record, so the same can be argued the other way as well. Rob On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, Matthew J. Dovey wrote: >> If the intention is to include properties describing the >> metadata record >> (REC), then perhaps it might be better for SRW/SRU to adopt >> the approach >> taken by OAI PMH and place this information in a record "header" >> separate from the metadata. > >This doesn't necessarily work in all cases - I think I did give the >learning object repository example where we potentially might return a >learning object, learning object metadata and learning object metadata >metadata (e.g. a REC record for the metadata). At present we *are* just >using different transactions (requesting different recordSchema) >depending on which we want back, and don't (yet) have a real requirement >to get all back in a single response. > >> This would be a useful place to park other types of data we haven't >> considered yet, for example Rights Data applying to the >> metadata record. > >The issue is we could add such a header - but in many ways we are >duplicating what other (and possible better) schemas such as METS, >MPEG21 etc. already do. > >Also adding the header does not necessarily address the other >requirement - which is someone who *is* using a container schema such as >METS may wish to be able to request what schemas are contained within >that container (admittedly it isn't yet clear whether this is a real >requirement now or just anticipation of a future one). > >Matthew >