On Tue, 15 Jul 2003, Chris Rusbridge wrote: > With respect, the whole point of the OAI movement (as distinct from ePrints) > is that the metadata is disclosed in a standard form that can be (and is) > harvested by a variety of services. National Libraries are amongst those > that should be considering such services, just as they are considering many > others. OAI makes their tasks easier, and the close identification of most > ePrint repositories with the OAI movement and its protocols means that your > ePrint wins on two counts: longevity since your institution will wish to > sustain evidence of its scholarship, and visibility/accessibility through > the disclosure and harvesting mechanisms.
I'm not quite sure of the intent of Chris's point (with which I fully agree), but I would like to make one slight correction concerning "the OAI movement (as distinct from ePrints)": There is (virtually) no eprints-as-distinct-from-OAI. Arxiv.org is OAI-compliant; so is CogPrints. Eprints.org was created and predicated on OAI-compliance; so was Dspace. (If OAI-compliance had been all that the worriers about preservation had been on about, then preservation would have been even more of a non-issue, as all the institutional eprint archives in question are OAI-compliant.) http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/ If the preservation worry is merely about making the papers self-archived on authors' websites OAI-compliant, we're all already for that ab ovo! Stevan Harnad