Re: France's HAL, OAI interoperability, and Central vs Institutional Repositories

From: Franck Laloe <laloe_at_LKB.ENS.FR>
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 16:25:11 +0200

At 14:14 02/10/2006, Stevan Harnad wrote:
          Franck Laloe: "HAL is not a harvester, and I hope it will
      never
          become one.  What is envisaged to actively couple the
      databases
          (Prodinra, for example, once it exists) is a more modern
      "Webservices
          (API) kind of technique, like the one currently used with
      the
          Digital Working Environment (DWI, ENT) Portal of the
      universities."

      It seems a pity if HAL, France's national repository, does
      not elect
      to benefit from the OAI metadata-harvesting protocol that
      makes all
      the distributed OAI-compliant repositories around the world
      equivalent
      and interoperable. Perhaps this is a misunderstanding and
      Franck could
      explain more explicitly how all of France's research output
      -- from all
      the distributes national research institutes CNRS, INRA,
      INRIA etc., as
      well as from all the indiviual French universities -- will be
      integrated
      into HAL (and from there into the worldwide network of
      OAI-compliant OA
      repositories)? On the face of it, distributed Institutional
      Repositories
      (IRs), all OAI-compliant, hence interoperable, would seem to
      be the
      natural way, but perhaps Franck can clarify this question?

      Stevan Harnad



All right!

Yes, as Stevan has guessed, this is a misunderstanding. Hal (and I
presume Prodinra) are of course OAI-PMH compatible, and of course can be
harvested within this protocol and others. This compatibility is a
necessary condition for an archive to be useful to the scientific
community. But a necessary condition is not always sufficient. We need
more interoperability than just that possible within OAI-PMH; Hal meets
this requirement.

I know that Stevan and others will disagree with the last sentence above,
but I certainly did not intend to start this discussion once more, even
less to trigger a controversy. The supporters of open archives should
save all their energies to make things progress and certainly not enter
in internal controversies.

My initial message was actually not intended for the list.

Best wishes to all

Franck

_______________________________________________________________
Franck Laloë, LKB, Dept physique de l'ENS, 24 rue Lhomond, F 75005 Paris
(France)
tel: 33 (1) 47 07 54 13; fax: 33 (1) 44 32 34 34 --  laloe_at_lkb.ens.fr
Received on Mon Oct 02 2006 - 17:40:11 BST