hussein suleman writes > this is a good question that i will try to answer, based on a fading memory > ... > > > 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.
Your memory is indeed fading. The Santa Fe meeting was informed by work of a group of authors: Herbert Van de Sompel, Thomas Krichel, Michael L. Nelson, Patrick Hochstenbach, Victor M. Lyapunov, Kurt Maly, Mohammad Zubair, Mohamed Kholief, Xiaoming Liu, and Heath O'Connell, The UPS Prototype project: exploring the obstacles in creating across e-print archive end-user service, Old Dominion University Computer Science TR 2000-01, February 2000. This is the full version. There is a censored version of it that apeared in D-LIB magazine, but the above is the full version, I still have a copy at http://openlib.org/home/krichel/papers/upsproto.pdf The project looked at building a user service uniting contents from the following archives: arXiv, CogPrints, NACA, NCSTRL, NDLTD and RePEc. Out of these NCSTRL is out of business, it was NSF funded, as soon as the funding stopped, it was dropped, bascially. Thus http://dlib.cs.odu.edu/publications.htm has a link to the full version, but it's a dead link to a server at Cornell where NCSTRL services lived. But all the others are still in business. > 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? I would be interested in seeing a list of these "many instances". There is indeed a problem of grant-funded digital libraries failing when the grant expires. This continues to be a serious problem. But I don't think this was the impetus for the OAI work. Cheers, Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel phone: +7 383 330 6813 skype: thomaskrichel