> Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 15:50:42 +0000 > From: Leslie Carr <[email protected]> > To: [email protected] > > > DS > How much do either [EPrints or DSpace -- or http://cdsware.cern.ch/] > > DS > conform to the OAIS reference model? > > > > SH> How much do they *need* to (and why?), in order to provide many years > > SH> of enhanced access and impact to otherwise unaffordable research, *now*? > > Quite. OAIS http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/overview.html > is an unfortunate acronym in that the "O" (open) and the "A" > (archive) clash quite rudely with the same letters in OAI > http://www.openarchives.org and BOAI http://www.soros.org/openaccess/. > > The "Open" in OAIS comes from the fact that the standard is open (the > archives may be closed), whereas OAI and BOAI assume open distribution > of metadata and open access to texts (respectively). The emphasis on > "Archive" in OAIS is a safe place to keep your data; in OAI and BOAI a > place to distribute your data/metadata from is of paramount > importance.
This is misleading. The "open" in OAI is explained in the OAI FAQ on the OAI website as follows: --->> What do you mean by "Open"? Our intention is "open" from the architectural perspective - defining and promoting machine interfaces that facilitate the availability of content from a variety of providers. Openness does not mean "free" or "unlimited" access to the information repositories that conform to the OAI-PMH. Such terms are often used too casually and ignore the fact that monetary cost is not the only type of restriction on use of information - any advocate of "free" information recognize that it is eminently reasonable to restrict denial of service attacks or defamatory misuse of information. <<--- This is available from http://www.openarchives.org/documents/FAQ.html The protocol is agnostic about the business or service environment in which it is used. The RDN www.rdn.ac.uk for example uses OAI to gather metadata from its contributing partners in a closed way. > It is worth noting that the scenarios given in OAIS are without exception > data archives - enormous collections of database records comprising > government forms or scientific measurements. In contrast, scholarly > papers are documents, not data; their purpose is communication rather > than processing. It is perhaps unsurprising that the users of these > documents require something different from their archives, accounting > for Stevan's emphasis on immediacy and access. This is again misleading. If you look at the following tutorial on the OAIS website by Don Sawyer and Lou Reich (dated October 2002) http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/nost/isoas/presentations/oais_tutorial_200210.ppt you will see several examples of document-related scenarios. In fact this tuturial notes that the OAIS model "adopted terminology that crosses various disciplines" and enumerates these as "traditional archivists", "scientific data centers", and "digital libraries". > Perhaps there is an unavoidable tension here - for a librarian, an article > about Cognitive Science can only be an object to be curated, whereas for a > Cognitive Scientist it is a message to be interpreted and used. Well ... I would argue that this is also again misleading. Curation and use are intimately connected: libraries engage in curatorial practices to support use. A librarian wants to make sure that what was written yesterday is available for you to use today. A librarian wants to make sure that an article you write today is available for somebody else to read tomorrow. I doubt whether you really only want to read today's articles, or to have your own work unavailable to somebody else tomorrow. And finally, this is a response to the specifics of Les's note; it does not comment on the wider discussion of which it is a part. Lorcan Dempsey, VP, Research, OCLC http://www.oclc.org/research/
