[OAI-implementers] Handling set membership changes

2004年1月17日 01:34:48 -0500

Hi all,
So, I was looking at what it would take to get Fedora's OAI provider interface to support sets for selective harvesting and I realized that communicating set membership changes to harvesters could be trouble.
Is there a sane way to deal with this? The only thing I can think of is to just treat the set membership change as a record modification, but this leaves certain harvesters in the dark. They will believe the record still exists in its prior set forever and hasn't been modified forever, unless:
 They are smart enough to recognize a setSpec change in a header, and
 a) They are lucky enough be selectively harvesting 
 on one of the new sets the record is in, or
 b) They only do incremental (not set-selective) harvesting.
-or- 
 They periodically dump everything and do a full harvest.
If I know up front that set membership is apt to change, should I:
 1) Not support sets in my provider.
 2) Support sets, but have a policy that if someone is harvesting
 from me, they agree to either:
 i) periodically dump everything and do a full harvest, or
 ii) never do set-selective harvesting
 3) Something else
Any recommendations or opinions on this?
Thanks,
Chris