> I too have a hypothesis: I think Andy is basically still
> thinking of IRs and CRs as being basically for the sake of
> archiving and preservation.
Again, just for the record...
No, I absolutely do not think in that way. Indeed, I suspect it is
*because* of our continued confusion between the need to surface content
on the web and the need to preserve it that many people conflate the two
into an institutional solution. This is a confusion I want us to move
away from.
My suggestion of approaching "someone like Brewster Kahle" has nothing
to do with his involvement in the Internet Archive and nothing to do
with preservation. It has only to do with the need to consider the
social networking benefits of globally concentrated solutions.
Building a viable scholarly social network is the key to the success of
repository movement IMHO. Whilst I would naturally tend to agree with
your assertion that distributed solutions should work better than
centralised solutions, I think we are seeing little or no network effect
from our current approach. Now, in part that is because we have adopted
a technical solution (the OAI-PMH) that works against the Web
architecture (contrast this with the blogsphere which has adopted a
technical solution (RSS/Atom) in line with the Web architecture), so my
argument for a globally concentrated solution may well be spurious.
But it is absolutely not based on an argument around preservation.
Andy
--
Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
http://efoundations.typepad.com/
andy.powell_at_eduserv.org.uk
+44 (0)1225 474319
Received on Mon Mar 10 2008 - 10:28:57 GMT