Regarding this note, one of the things we're struggling with in setting up a
pilot of an IR at the University of Reading (the School of Systems
Engineering and the School of Maths, Meteorology and Physics are jointly
piloting an IR for the Univrsity) is that of manually inputting local
institutional co-authors. It's one of the weaknesses, IMHO, of the GNU
eprints software that it doesn't have two methods of author input - selection
from a list of institutional users already registered, and free text input of
non-institutional authors. In fact, even with non-institutional authors, it's
quite common to regularly author joint papers with the same
non-co-institutional a number of times, if one has a productive external
collaboration. I would prefer, rather than manually entering each author name
in free text, to have a search system available for "registered authors" not
all of whom need to be registered users of the system (which deals with the
issue of people leaving institutions and stopping being registered users but
remaining as authors for their prior papers). If a new co-author is to be
entered, then minimising the number of keystrokes and the utility of having
more than just free-text name-entry only available, though not neceesarily
mandated, should be considered. As the IR grows then, if it is deemed useful,
people can be employed to add extra information onto the non-user author
details, such as affiliation at the time the paper was deposited, and
possibly cross-links to other IRs containing the works of that author (which
could also be useful for authors moving between institutions).
--
*E-mail*a.a.adams_at_rdg.ac.uk******** Dr Andrew A Adams
**snail*27 Westerham Walk********** School of Systems Engineering
***mail*Reading RG2 0BA, UK******** The University of Reading
****Tel*+44-118-378-6997*********** Reading, United Kingdom
Received on Tue Aug 15 2006 - 19:25:09 BST