At 01:45 27/05/04 +0100, Heather Morrison wrote:
> An institutional repository is merely a new form of collection of
> information.
Not *merely* a collection, it is much more than that. Evidence from ArXiv
shows that open access archives become a focus for intense social activity
and interaction
http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/
http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/
>From deposit, dissemination alerts, *immediate and significant* levels of
usage, to citation
http://citebase.eprints.org/java/correlation/correlation.html
Don't think of institutional repositories as black-box storage while the
real action goes on elsewhere. They will be the focal points of scholarly
research because their primary role is access. Compared with arXiv, the
initial access points for IRs will be distributed services and interfaces,
but the level of activity will be just as intense.
In other words, IRs must be designed and managed as live services not as
passive back-up.
Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Received on Thu May 27 2004 - 22:39:14 BST