On Fri, 22 Jun 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote:
> sh >[I might add only that the distinction between "personal web home page"
> sh >and "e-print servers" is silly, incoherent, and hence untenable, but it
> sh >makes no difference, if it makes some people happy to put it that way...]
>
> There is distinction that to many authors may be important:
>
> E-print servers that are well stocked are a somewhat more convenient place
> to look for particular articles compared to hunting down the authors' home
> pages and looking there. Of greater consequence, researchers who are not
> looking for articles by the authors in question may find articles by them
> on that well-stocked e-print server, like them, and use them.
Quite right, and this is one of the principal rationales for the Open
Archives Initiative (OAI)
http://www.openarchives.org and Eprints
archive-creating software
http://www.eprints.org
OAI provides a tagging standard that makes all registered OAI-compliant
Archives interoperable, hence harvestable across archives
http://oaisrv.nsdl.cornell.edu/Register/BrowseSites.pl
so you need not know the URL of the paper or the
author.
You just search them like one big virtual archive in a centralized
index: See
http://cite-base.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search
and
http://arc.cs.odu.edu/
But the home-page/public distinction is moot, since authors can run
their own eprints servers too, and register them as OAI-compliant!
http://rocky.dlib.vt.edu/~oai/cgi-bin/Explorer/oai1.0/testoai
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Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
Received on Wed Jan 03 2001 - 19:17:43 GMT