Re: Cliff Lynch on Institutional Archives

From: Lee Miller <lnm2_at_CORNELL.EDU>
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 16:41:28 -0500

On Sun. Mar 16 Thomas Krichel wrote:
> Lee Miller writes
>
> > The simplest way to aggregate papers within disciplines would be include a
> > discipline field in the metadata. ...... Thus inclusion of the discipline
> > desciptor "ecology" would allow aggregation of papers at a level that has
> > already proved useful to ecologists for over a century.
> >
> > A similar level of aggregation in other fields would surely be useful as a
> > tool for harvesting papers of particular interest from institutional
> archives.

> Yes, but this is not what I think is the prime task of aggregator
> services. Your thinking is that such services will make it easier
> for users to find papers belonging to a certain discipline. Within
> that thinking I agree there is scope for value-added user services.
> For example, once you have identified all paper is the area
> of ecology, you can start something like "NEP: New Ecology
> Papers". That is, you can mail a list of all the new papers
> that have appeared within the subject of ecology out to
> editors (who would be working as volunteers) and then have
> them filter those papers that belong to microorganisms,
> terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, etc, and forward the
> paper discriptions to a list of subscribers who are interested
> in those subjects. Such a system already works well with
> RePEc, see http://nep.repec.org.
>
> But: such value added services for users are not the main
> function of aggregators, imho. Aggregators are more about
> serving the authors of papers. They should be conceived
> as instruments to incentivize authors to contribute to
> formal archives.

You want to use aggregation to as an incentive to authors, and I see
aggregation as merely a tool to help consumers of research narrow their
searches. I don't see these options as being mutually exclusive. Both are
valuable.

Lee Miller
Received on Sun Mar 16 2003 - 21:41:28 GMT

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