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Hussein Suleman wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:47D24452.7010405@cs.uct.ac.za" type="cite">hi
Atanu
<br>
<br>
this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading
memory ...
<br>
<br>
in the 90s we had a few large subject repositories around the world
(like arXiv) but they were mostly not (financially) sustainable as they
were run by poor scholarly societies, there was a silo effect (with the
owners of data trying to provide services as well) and the model simply
did not replicate to all disciplines (we were stuck with a handful of
poster child repositories) ... in some senses, this "crisis" in subject
repositories led to the Santa Fe meeting of the OAI.
<br>
<br>
to address especially the sustainability problem, open access advocates
began to recommend institutional repositories rather than subject
repositories because scholarship is a primary function of institutions
and if anything will be here hundreds of years from now it will be the
institutions of higher learning.
<br>
<br>
the core idea of OAI-PMH was therefore to bridge between sustainable
repositories (e.g., IRs, although the term did not exist back then) and
high quality service providers (e.g., those hosted by scholarly
societies)
<br>
<br>
so OAI-PMH is supposed to give us the best of both worlds. it is
tempting to believe that global subject repositories will be a better
model, but this did not work in the 90s. maybe it will work now (maybe
scholarly societies, research agencies, etc. have deeper pockets now) -
we dont know for sure - but who is willing to invest a lot of money and
many years on redoing an experiment that failed in many instances not
too long ago?
<br>
<br>
ttfn,
<br>
----hussein
<br>
</blockquote>
Hi Hussein<br>
In a sense, this developments related to funding have driven technology
design for IRs and the subsequent requirement for self-archiving
mandate itself. <br>
Best<br>
<strong><font face="Tahoma" size="1">Atanu Garai<br>
</font></strong><font face="Tahoma" size="1">Online Networking
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