> I too have a hypothesis: I think Andy is basically still > thinking of IRs and CRs as being basically for the sake of > archiving and preservation.
Again, just for the record... No, I absolutely do not think in that way. Indeed, I suspect it is *because* of our continued confusion between the need to surface content on the web and the need to preserve it that many people conflate the two into an institutional solution. This is a confusion I want us to move away from. My suggestion of approaching "someone like Brewster Kahle" has nothing to do with his involvement in the Internet Archive and nothing to do with preservation. It has only to do with the need to consider the social networking benefits of globally concentrated solutions. Building a viable scholarly social network is the key to the success of repository movement IMHO. Whilst I would naturally tend to agree with your assertion that distributed solutions should work better than centralised solutions, I think we are seeing little or no network effect from our current approach. Now, in part that is because we have adopted a technical solution (the OAI-PMH) that works against the Web architecture (contrast this with the blogsphere which has adopted a technical solution (RSS/Atom) in line with the Web architecture), so my argument for a globally concentrated solution may well be spurious. But it is absolutely not based on an argument around preservation. Andy -- Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/ http://efoundations.typepad.com/ [email protected] +44 (0)1225 474319
