I would like to raise a query on a point of information regarding the problem of subject classification for University Eprint Archives.
Let us first clarify a potential point of misunderstanding. There are (at least) two ways to think of University Eprint Archives, both of them important and valid, but most decidedly not both the same. Hence conflating these two aspects of Institutional Archiving and assuming one size shoe is needed for both risks creating podiatric problems for both! (1) The University Eprint Archive as the University Digital Library -- or, more specifically, the University Digital Library for all of the University's own scholarly, scientific and pedagogic output. (This includes journal articles, books, teaching materials, and any other digital content the University produces and wishes to include in its Eprint Archive.) There is no question whatsoever that a rigorous system of classification and tagging -- to make such a total university digital output navigable, and integrable and interoperable with corresponding digital output from other universities, in similar University Eprint Archives -- is extremely important to have, indeed a prerequisite for the usefulness and usability of such an Archive. (2) The University Eprint Archive as a means of providing open access to all of the university's peer-reviewed research output (before and after peer review). Almost without exception, this is the work that also appears in the peer-reviewed journals sooner or later (indeed, that is how it gets peer-reviewed). It should be clear that (2) is a very special subset of (1). But it should be equally clear that that special subset does not have any particular or pressing classification problem! These are not books. They are journal articles. Our journal articles are not indexed in our university library card catalogues (only the journals in which they appear are). When we want to search the journal literature, we do not look to any university classification system, we go to indexing services such as INSPEC, MEDLINE, ISI, etc. (These have their own classification systems, but I am willing to bet that for this corpus not one of those can beat google-style boolean search on an inverted full-text index, especially if aided by citation-frequency, hit-based, recency-based, or relevance-based ranking of search output, as done, for example, by http://citebase.eprints.org/help/index.php ). I think it is extremely important to make it crystal clear that the peer-reviewed research corpus -- and those University Eprint Archives for which this is the main target literature at this time -- do not have a classification problem, and need not and should not wait for any solution to any classification problem before getting on with the infinitely more pressing task of filling those archives with their university's research output! Now some specific comments and queries: On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Pauline Simpson wrote: > At the OAI Geneva I undertook to do the following: > 2. Investigate OAI and OAF email archives for prior discussion and > synthesize > 3. Open the discussion with the intention of constructing a model/s to > address perceived problems. We will need a statement of the problem/s and > suggested solutions (some already articulated on Saturday) I was unfortunately unable to attend the Geneva OAI Meeting, so I would like to address a question to Pauline: Are the perceived problems in question the classification problems of University Eprint Archives conceived in sense (1), i.e. as university digital libraries for all university scholarly and pedagogic output? or conceived in sense (2), i.e., as a means of providing open access to university research output? And if the two were not distinguished formally and explcitily in this way, was it made clear to all concerned at least informally that the classification problem applies only to (1) and not to (2)? > At present we have completed item 2 and and are now compiling a table of > all e-Print archives (that we can find!) with an annotation of what subject > classification they 'appear' to be using : LOC; DDC; In House > Classification (possibly based on LOC or another); In House > terminology; Faculty/Dept/Group; None. Again, I wonder whether you could make it clear what the objective of this exercise would be for those University Eprint Archives that have been created exclusively, or primarily, to provide open access to university research output (i.e., 2), hence having no need whatsoever to adopt or use any classification system? > I believe this evidence gathering > exercise will be a worthwhile tool in our deliberations concerning > harvesting and interoperability between institutional and discipline based > e-Print archives. Again, I think it would be immensely helpful, and would help both agenda (1) and agenda (2) along their respective paths if the two agendas were clearly distinguished and it were made clear that the classification problem pertains exclusively to agenda (1). [Let me add that agenda (1) (the university digital output library) is very important and very worth pursuing; it is also an extremely valuable collaborator to agenda (2) (open access to peer-reviewed research through institutional self-archiving), but only if the two agendas facilitate rather than restrain one another -- as any implication that agenda (2) has classification problems to solve would most definitely do.] Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01 & 02): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: [email protected] See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm the OAI site: http://www.openarchives.org and the free OAI institutional archiving software site: http://www.eprints.org/ _______________________________________________ OAI-eprints mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openlib.org/mailman/listinfo/oai-eprints
