May I suggest that we should never, never, never! get used to being shocked and surprised by some of the aspects of digital libraries, but rather to the warm feeling of having done something about them.
It seems to me that metadata support for journal articles, while fundamental, is the least of our worries in this area. People have been cataloging journal articles for a long time, and it shouldn't be that hard to map established practice to a mechanical representation. More urgently, I feel, we need to think a bit about how we ought to go forward. I see two roads: o adapt repository software (such as DSpace) to permit the behaviors needed in representing paper journals online o develop the most appropriate ways of organizing journal articles for online presentation, and support those ways People are used to seeing papaer journals as *ordered* collections of articles (buttered in-between with features and announcements and similar matter) as issues within *ordered* collections of issues as volumes. To go this route, we need to generalize a bit so that we can create new subclasses of containment in addition to communities and collections and items. Order hasn't received enough attention in the design of DSpace. But is that really the most useful way of organizing journal articles? It's important to keep the association with the journal "brand", and it's valuable to preserve the binding to time, but I don't think that people read volumes or journals; even if they habitually read from cover to cover, what they read is articles and features and whatnot. Is there really a need for volume and issue to be structural elements at all? If we simply tag items with these attributes as metadata, and provide top-quality tools for searching on these attributes (as well as others), won't that serve? If we have a submission process that can deal efficiently with repetitive metadata when submitting items which are related, won't that be sufficient? How do readers, and catalogers, *want* to do their work? How close can we reasonably get? We have a new medium to work with, and we should be careful of accepting the needs and limitations of other media out of habit. But we should also consider the value that we might get from old ways. What we need is not new ways or old ways, but best ways. -- Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] Friends don't let friends publish revisable-form documents.
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