On 30 Nov 2009, at 21:15, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
Any Internet 101 course will include plenty of examples
where deposit, content and service are assembled within a
single site (by one provider, company etc.) - the list is
really very long, from ArXiv to Amazon, SSRN to Flickr,
RePEc to Facebook and so on. Internet 101 theory will
then elucidate why this is so an (e.g. network effects,
economies of scale and so on). Creating thousands of
little repositories was probably never a good idea (and
seemingly based on the fundamental misunderstanding that
the Internet may be conquered by political willpower
alone...). No wonder the harvesting, searching and
collecting has never worked.
Nevertheless, we do have all those little and near empty
repositories (more than 1000), and it is thus necessary
and useful to consider how the situation can be improved
and repositories given a purpose that will foster their
acceptance by scholars. Acceptance comes through service.
I think Chris is referring to a Web 101 course (such as I teach on
Web Technology and Web science courses). The Web architecture is a
distributed, decentralised information system consisting of a
multitude of servers and services. As Chris points out, this list of
servers is really very long indeed! But I am not sure how Chris can
claim that harvesting and searching has never worked, since it is in
fact the basis on which tens and hundreds of millions of people
experience the Web on a daily basis.
---
Les Carr
Received on Tue Dec 01 2009 - 00:58:46 GMT