Apologies for the test email (previous posts had been rejected).
One thing that concerns me from the recent JISC Repositories conference
in Manchester is that there seems to be some over-enthusiasm towards
so-called web2.0 applications solving our repository-type problems.
While I see these applications as being very successful in terms of
building communities, well designed interfaces, great features,
cost-effective hosting etc I think we are benefiting from being at the
start of a growth in this type of system where an ecology of systems in
yet to evolve. It strikes me that as more and more of these systems are
built then we'll be struck with the same interoperability problem that
we face today within the information environment landscape e.g. not
being able to search across repositories/ service providers with
sufficient accuracy, needing many different login details, no easy
access to full text/ full movie, high resolution image etc
Here's a question: in 5 years time when there are 10 web2.0 communities
for each type of resource (power point, image, movie text) will we be
able to use these systems for academic tasks?
My opinion is that these communities will not be as open or
interoperable as we need them to be long term, and we'll end up with the
similar problem we have now: a researcher who needs to search and
discover the 10 best resources on a topic will have to use many
different logins (credentials), use many search engines, create the same
document using many different authoring applications and so on. So will
we be able to/ need to lobby the big players to provide the services we
need if we deposit material within these web2.0 repositories?
At essence, is this is the old problem of fostering collaboration/
interoperability in a competitive market (today based largely on
advertising revenues).
Regards, Howard Noble, University of Oxford
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