Yup, I’m spamming my own blog…again. Earlier today on the handle-info mailing list, I made the following announcement about the open source (BSD license) release of the Handle System Web Services developed at Cornell:
As I’ve stated in the past on this list and elsewhere, last year, Bill Kehoe and I created some basic Web Services for creating persistent identifiers using our fledgling Handle System implementation at Cornell University Library, and we have finally gotten permission to release the software under a open source BSD license. We created this software for our own needs at CUL, and our primary goals were to simplify the Handle System API for creating persistent identifiers and to allow the Handle System to be used more easily from within other platforms. Its main features are:
- single and batched CRUD operations on a handle server exposed as Web Services,
- unique IDs generated from a NOID minter,
- IP authentication of the Web Services, and
- clients for Java and Perl.
This code is obviously still in a pretty primitive state, but it appears to work well for administering simple persistent identifier CRUD operations on an individual handle server. We offer it as a starting point for those who would like to implement something similar. You can download the software at the project Web site:
http://handle.library.cornell.edu
By registering at the site, you can also contribute bug reports, feature requests, documentation and patches, ask for help, and subscribe to RSS feeds, among other things.
What future this project has or doesn’t have will depend upon not only outside interest and participation, but also upon similar work currently being done at CNRI. At the Handle System workshop in Washington D.C. on June 21, 2007, Larry Lannom announced that CNRI is currently working toward simplifying the Handle System API and providing a Web Services interface to the Handle System. At least until that time, we hope you find this option helpful.
The article I wrote describing this work has been accepted by DLIB for publication in the September/October 2007 edition.