At 9:21 am +0100 18/5/00, Thomas Krichel wrote:
>...
>
> The problem with self-archiving by authors is the growing tendency
> of authors to deposit their papers in homepages. It is debatable
> if this sort of activity is real "archiving". What we need is to
> have more agents, acting on behalf of authors that will hopefully
> make more long-term archiving possible. The archiving through
> an agent is what I call "formal" archiving, and I oppose it to
> the tendency of "informal" archiving in homepages. My impression
> is that formal archiving is relatively declining, whereas informal
> archiving is on the increase. I see the OAi as an attempt of formal
> archivers to regain initiative.
Good point. But the problem as we know from other computer science
domains is that people need a good reason to bother to formalize
information for systems - the cost-benefit tradeoff. One would hope
that authors see it in their interest to publish on an OAI server,
for instance, but structuring and submitting bibliographic data is
extra work. For instance, if an author has already submitted a
document to their own organization's report library, they don't want
to have to do it all over again for an eprint archive.
Various options for getting a new document onto a server whilst
minimising the burden on the author suggest themselves:
- author takes responsibility to manually submit document to eprint
server in addition to any other archives
- other archives automatically forward their submissions to eprint archive
- all archives become OAI compliant(!) so no forwarding of
submissions is required
- author's favourite bibliographic management tool (Bib; EndNnote;
etc) uploads details to eprint server, which emails author with URL
to go to form to complete any missing details
- author publishes document citation details on homepage, an
intelligent agent spots and parses this, fills out the eprint server
form as far as possible and emails author with URL to go to form to
complete any missing details
- <dream on>
Simon
--
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Dr Simon Buckingham Shum Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
Mailto:sbs_at_acm.org
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/sbs/ Tel: +44 (0)1908-655723
eFax: +44 (0)870-122-8765 (personal) +44 (0)1908-653169 (office)
Jnl. Interactive Media in Education: http://www-jime.open.ac.uk
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"What gets measured is not always important,
and what is important cannot always be measured" A. Einstein
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT