Proposed collectable data interchange format

I see Jay has made an interesting proposal to create a new mailing list with the purpose to specifically design a standard interchange format. I am in full agreement with this idea hope to see this new list formed soon.

Until then I will respond to his opening technical points here.

On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:25:50 -0500, Jay West wrote:
.....
Each site who wants to participate would (in an automated fashion)
periodically (nightly?) run a program or process that takes data about their
collection items and puts it into this standard record format. The format
has things like document name, title, description, document type, owner
site, http vs. ftp, URL, FTP address, email contact, date, key words,
categories, distribution allowed, etc. For example, a program could pretty
easily be created that would take all the documents on bitsavers and puts
them into this standard record format. Then the source systems send this
record dump (or deltas from a previous dump) to the classiccmp server.

The classiccmp server takes all these records from all the various sites and
puts them together into a single database internally, and also provides a
seamless mechanism (http, and yes... gopher, archie?) for people to search
the database or browse based on given criteria. It looks like one database.
But when a user tries to pull up one of the specific entries it is actually
redirected to the sponsoring systems server to get the data.

This way each system can keep their classic data (jpegs, pdfs, disk images,
whatever) in the format they are already using without changing anything.
They just need to have something that takes their format/sources and puts it
into the standard format which is then sync'd to classiccmp.org.

Provisions could be made to the standard record format to address all types
of media, allow some items to be listed as "present" but "unavailable" for
things that can't be released due to copyright issues (but at least people
would know it had been preserved).
...........

The first thing that stands out with this idea, is the reliance on a central repository. I think that we would be better off looking at more distributed system where an add, update, delete transaction record was polled from ones peers more like an RSS or for that matter a news feed comes to mind.

more as things develop ..