[OAI-eprints] Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives

[Thomas Krichel]

  Stevan Harnad writes

> Thomas gived exactly the correct answer to Chris!

  I didn't know this was a quiz :-) 

> What is needed is institutional self-archiving, distributed across its
> departments interoperably, but customized to the different needs of the
> different disciplines.

  That is a tall order. 

> (1) Institutions can mandate self-archiving, disciplines cannot.

  Cliff imagines that they can, but in practice, it will be tough.
  You can not put a KGB officer in every academic's office!

> (2) Most disciplines do not have disciplinary OAI Archives at all.

  Sure, but all have some ways to communicate informally, and many
  have innovative channels. Sure, many of them stay small, but
  there is not technical obstacle to a meaningful aggergation. 

> (4) There are many other potential uses for institutional research
> archives (apart from open access).

  I agree. If I would run an institution's archive I would back
  up all the web sites each year. In 20 years time, you would get
  a fascinating picture of the development of the institution. 

> (5) OAI-interoperability guarantees that institutional and disciplinary
> self-archiving are equivalent from the open-access point of view, but
> aggregating institutional packages out of distributed disciplinary
> OAI archives is harder (though it is not clear how much harder) than
> aggregating disciplinary packages out of distributed institutional
> OAI archives.

  no, it is easier to construct feature-rich datasets out of 
  disciplinary archives, because some of them will be prepared
  with the specifics of an aggregator in mind.

  With greetings from Minsk, Belarus,


  Thomas Krichel                         http://openlib.org/home/krichel
                                     RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel