At 15:10 11/02/2003 +0000, Stevan Harnad wrote:
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.
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.
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.
---
Les Carr
Southampton University
