[AMF-talk] Re: breadth of AMF

[baum]

Sune,

I wholly agree that there are good reasons to have a software template (or 
some manner of distinction) that permits services to segregate software 
from papers in RePEc. Indeed, there are good reasons to have a dataset 
template (or distinction) as well (rather than treating datasets as 
ancillary files to papers describing their contents). And if a scheme is 
entitled the 'Academic Metadata Format', it must be capable of representing 
all of the types of materials which academics are interested in using, or 
it is not IMHO worthy of the name. Of course AMF can be extended in this 
manner; the question is, will it be? There has been a notable lack of 
enthusiasm to do so (some sort of ideological purity among those formerly 
known as librarians?), which leads me to the decidedly suboptimal solution 
of recoding software templates into pseudo-paper-templates, and losing the 
distinction that presently exists between the two. I don't think that is in 
our best interest, but neither is creating orphans of software templates 
due to their inability to be expressed in OAI-compliant terms.

Thx
Kit

--On Tuesday, October 1, 2002 11:09 +0200 Sune Karlsson 
<Sune.Karlsson@hhs.se> wrote:

> baum wrote:
>>
>> I have not seen any clear response to my enquiry: shall we consider
>> merging the software series into the paper series? As noted, there is
>> very little specific in the software-template, and it would resolve the
>> issue of their appearing in AMF and OAI.
>>
>
> There is a reason that we have a software template, that software is
> different from articles and papers. Not because software might require
> different fields in the template, just because it is a different kind of
> thing and that in itself is interesting.
>
> This could of course be expressed in other ways than through the
> Template-Type field but this is how ReDIF is designed. Changing this
> would require more or less far-reaching modifications to every service
> using RePEc data. As the maintainer of two services my natural laziness
> makes me inclined to think that this is a bad idea.
>
> If AMF can not be extended to deal with software my suggestion would be
> to coerce the software templates into paper templates for the purpose of
> getting it into the OAI gateway.
>
> /Sune
>
> --
> Sune Karlsson                      | Fax: + 46 8 34 81 61
> Stockholm School of Economics      | Phone: + 46 8 736 92 39
> Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden | http://www.hhs.se/personal/SuneK/
> http://econpapers.hhs.se/          | http://swopec.hhs.se/
>
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________________________________________________________________________
Christopher F Baum, Boston College Economics, Chestnut Hill MA 02467 USA
baum@bc.edu                       http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-v/baum.fac.html