Rod Page: The dangers of the ‘free’ cloud: The Case of CrossRef

[Jonathan Rees]

For your amusement:

http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/the-dangers-of-the-free-cloud-the-case-of-crossref/

I assume this is about the HTTP-based service that resolves them, not
to the underlying handle system, which is redundant.

[Larry Lannom]

Right, its not the handle system. In fact its not any part of the
normal resolution system at all. The system they're talking about in
that thread is a metadata look-up service associated with the
'appropriate copy' problem. Libraries who have a 'local linking
server' first check their local collections before resolving the
handle. They do this by sending the DOI to a separate Crossref service
based on a large bibliographic database and getting back some metadata
which they use to query their local holdings. This is just simple web-
based database query, not a handle resolution. The problem is that
that service was not designed as a redundant real-time service. So it
goes down sometimes and when its down some of those library servers
behave badly. If they don't get back a useful answer those local
servers are supposed to reset and go through the regular DOI
resolution system, which is highly redundant, but they don't seem to
always do that.

I hadn't seen this discussion before, so thanks for sending it. This
was supposed to be a temporary solution on everyone's part - and its
now 10 years old. There may be a lesson to be learned there - once you
get collaboration among a somewhat disparate group and get something
working, don't assume it will be easy to improve it at a later date.

Larry

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=========================================
Larry Lannom
Director of Information Management Technology
Vice President
Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)
Suite 100, 1895 Preston White Dr, Reston, VA 20191

email: lla...@cnri.reston.va.us
web: www.cnri.reston.va.us
tel: 703 620 8990

[Alan Ruttenberg]

The problem here is the reliance on free services rather than free
data. With free data if someone can't provide adequate access someone
else can take over, or you can simply cache it locally.

> web: www.cnri.reston.va.us <http://www.cnri.reston.va.us>
> tel:  703 620 8990
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