Dear All: FYI, NLA (National Library of Australia) membuat ARO (Australian Research Online) gateway.. untuk memudahkan setiap pemustaka memperoleh hasil penelitian dari Australia, namun ada masalah mengenai etika penggunaan metadata oleh ARO. Mungkin email dibawah ini ada baiknya sebagai masukan apabila di kemudian hari Perpusnas melakukan hal yang sama. btw. JIBIS khabarnya gimana ya?
Salam, Imam Budi ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Arthur Sale <a...@ozemail.com.au> Date: Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 8:01 AM Subject: Unethical harvesters To: jisc-repositor...@jiscmail.ac.uk I write to draw the list’s attention to unethical behaviour by a national harvester – the Australian Research Online gateway. This gateway, operated by the National Library of Australia, has rejected the OAI-PMH standard and has announced a local variant. This sort of behaviour by harvesters must be firmly stamped on as soon as possible. International standards are to be complied with, not modified for budgetary convenience. Responsibility It is the responsibility of any OAI-PMH harvester such as ARO, ADT, ROAR, OpenDOAR, OAIster, etc to harvest correctly from all OAI-PMH-compliant repositories that exist in the wild and which it regard as its target group. Please examine that sentence carefully: the responsibility is with a gateway (which ARO is) to harvest from any compliant OAI-PMH interface, and not to misrepresent the data. The National Library fails on both counts. Remember that international standards such as OAI-PMH are designed to permit global interchange of metadata. Any harvester that insists on some individual or local restriction of the international standard is irresponsible. I did not expect this of the National Library of Australia. So far it seems to be globally unique in this behaviour. Why does it fail? In a nutshell, possible hubris and probable laziness. As to hubris, the NLA has produced a set of requirements for harvesting to which expects repositories to comply. Requiring each repository to comply with its “requirements” rather than National Library of Australia (NLA) harvesting properly: · multiplies the work as each Australian repository has to adapt its interface or opt-out (rather than the NLA doing the job properly once), · introduces the chance of breaking an existing harvesting arrangement if the repository changes its interface, and · would be absolutely fatal to the whole global enterprise if another harvester came up with incompatible requirements. In the case of my university it would definitely break our in-house one-on-one harvesting for Government data reporting and would be likely to have similar flow on effects for our national PhD thesis harvesting at the very least. If all harvesters were to come up with idiosyncratic requirements, the world would be in a real mess and harvesting, not to mention search engines, would be infeasible. Just imagine if Google were to behave the same way in the html world! At most these ARO “requirements” constitute a set of suggestions. The probable laziness comes from programmers. It is trivially easy to do a proper harvest from all the repositories that exist in Australia (there are not that many and even fewer softwares). I can think of at least two strategies, neither of which would take more than an hour of a competent programmer’s time. ADT and the rest of the world’s OAI harvesters can do it, why can’t the NLA? “Best Practice” I hesitated to write this section because some will think it is important. It isn’t. The main issue is the one above. However, it is bound to be raised by the NLA to justify their so-called “requirements”. This is the argument that their harvesting “requirements” are good practice. In fact it is not difficult to mount a case that the GNU EPrints scheme is better practice than the ARO scheme. Consider these quotes from the Dublin Core Initiative (the red is mine): “4.14. Identifier Label: Resource Identifier Element Description: An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context. Recommended best practice is to identify the resource by means of a string or number conforming to a formal identification system. Examples of formal identification systems include the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) (including the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and the International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Guidelines for content creation: This element can also be used for local identifiers (e.g. ID numbers or call numbers) assigned by the Creator of the resource to apply to a particular item. It should not be used for identification of the metadata record itself.” [Using Dublin Core - The Elements, http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/elements.shtml] “3. Element Content and Controlled Vocabularies Each Dublin Core element is optional and repeatable, and there is no defined order of elements. The ordering of multiple occurrences of the same element (e.g., Creator) may have a significance intended by the provider, but ordering is not guaranteed to be preserved in every user environment.” [Using Dublin Core, http://dublincore.org/documents/usageguide/] The NLA “requirements” specify that the relevant metadata must be in a dc:identifier field contrary to these guidelines. Further ARO “require” that the first dc:identifier element be the metadata identifier, despite clear indications that order does not matter. Don’t get me wrong. I am not on a crusade to change the way repositories currently present their OAI-PMH elements, unlike ARO. I really don’t care much how they interpret the standards. But I do care about the NLA assuming such a bullying stance in relation to Australian repositories. Already at least two Australian repositories have confessed to changing their OAI-PMH interface to suit ARO! If this happens elsewhere, the consequences for open access are significant as incompatibilities are bound to arise. Conclusions 1. Readers of the list should be alert for similar unethical behaviour in their territories. 2. ARO and the NLA should start harvesting from the Australian OAI-PMH interfaces correctly, as soon as possible, just as the rest of the world does. 3. In the meantime, mis-harvested repositories should be withdrawn from the ARO gateway database. 4. If ARO does not comply, Australian repositories will need to consider boycotting the service. Arthur Sale Emeritus Professor of Computer Science University of Tasmania ------------------------------------ "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" --T.S. Elliot (1888-1965)Yahoo! 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