At 01:45 27/05/04 +0100, Heather Morrison wrote:
An institutional repository is merely a new form of collection of information.
Not *merely* a collection, it is much more than that. Evidence from ArXiv shows that open access archives become a focus for intense social activity and interaction http://opcit.eprints.org/tdb198/opcit/ http://opcit.eprints.org/ijh198/
From deposit, dissemination alerts, *immediate and significant* levels of
usage, to citation http://citebase.eprints.org/java/correlation/correlation.html Don't think of institutional repositories as black-box storage while the real action goes on elsewhere. They will be the focal points of scholarly research because their primary role is access. Compared with arXiv, the initial access points for IRs will be distributed services and interfaces, but the level of activity will be just as intense. In other words, IRs must be designed and managed as live services not as passive back-up. Steve Hitchcock IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865