I've been mulling over a possible project involving TPR for a while.
Back when I worked as a librarian I became aware of the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL), which is essentially a federated database for computer science articles. The articles are often available in full-text, being pre-prints and other types of online publications. NCSTRL is used quite a bit by grad students, and compsci professors and includes materials from many organizations: from the NASA Langley Technical Reports Server, to Trinity College Dublin, to the MIT AI Lab.
Fairly recently NCSTRL began using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) which is an protocol (XML over HTTP) for sharing and harvesting metadata. The protocol is actually quite elegant, and provides a framework for making all sorts of metadata formats available. Essentially it allows organizations to share their metadata in such a way that it can be harvested periodically by service providers. Kind of like RSS syndication, but for metadata.
I've been thinking it could be really cool to create a OAI repository for the TPR. This would basically amount to a Perl program listening for HTTP/OAI requests, that could serve up metadata about TPR articles. This would get the TPR articles into not only NCSTRL, but any other OAI archive that decided to harvest TPR content.
Some publishers (Institute of Physics, Elsevier) are starting up OAI repositories of their own for their content. I think that if we could get a repository up for TPR it would increase the exposure of it's content...and could even be a useful thing to have running at other Perl content houses (perl.com, etc).
I've emailed brian d foy about this and he said to look into it, so I'm going to, and if anyone else interested in helping out let me know.
