Andy,
I think you are in danger of confusing apples and pomegranates.
IRs are not a complete scholarly communication service, they are just the entry point to a service. You add your item to the local IR and the metadata plus link could surface in a dozen other services (Google, OAIster, CiteSeer, etc).
You claim people wouldn't add their PP presentations to a local service, this might be true if it was just local but what if you said 'Add your presentation to my local service and I will place it on SlideShare and any/all other services where people might look for such presentations' and I think you might have a winner.
I don't understand why the phrase Social Networking was mentioned. Repositories are not social networks and have no need to be. ArXiv is a very successful repository if we go by size and use yet it has no SN facilities. Why, because it is part of a much larger system called scholarly publishing which does include feedback and commenting mechanisms like refereeing, review papers and citations. In the future I expect virtual/overlay journals to provide other mechanisms. The communications (or social networking) takes place at this higher level.
Your comment:
> imagine a world in which every
> institution mandated to their academics that they must only blog
> using
> an institutional blogging service - would that support or hinder
> the
> development of a vibrant academic blogging environment?
misses the point, a blog is an end in itself containing items and comments and includes the user interface, etc, but an IR is just small part of a much larger whole.
Regards,
John Smith,
University of Kent, UK.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andy Powell
> Sent: 10 March 2008 13:16
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
>
> Hmmm... the fact that you "have never, ever, ever heard anyone
> refuse
> to use our institution's timetabling software because the user
> interface
> isn't good enough" rather misses the point - or my point at least.
>
> This is not a discussion about whether the user-interface of each
> IR is
> good enough or not.
>
> It's a discussion about what makes one or more repositories grow
> into a
> viable scholarly social network. The UI is a small facet of
> that...
> what I'm suggesting is that the 'social networking' aspect is more
> important and that we need to understand that aspect rather better
> than
> we do now in order to understand why repositories remain unfilled.
>
> Take something like Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) as a case
> study -
> albeit one with significant differences to the scholarly
> repositories
> space in terms of content, responsibilities and the surrounding
> political landscape of scholarly publishing. But bear with me
> nonetheless...
>
> Ask yourself what makes Slideshare such a successful repository of
> presentation-like material - i.e. such a compelling place to
> surface
> that sort of content on the Web? Yes, part of the answer lies in
> UI
> type issues. But more fundamentally the answer lies in the
> network
> effects of a globally concentrated service. Could the functional
> equivalent of Slideshare have emerged by getting people to put
> their
> presentations on the Web in a distributed manner and then
> harvesting
> them into a central service? I don't think so. Ditto Flickr,
> ditto
> YouTube, ditto ...
>
> Having said that, I accept that the blogsphere is a good counter
> case
> study... because the blogsphere does give us an example of a
> healthy
> social network built on a distributed based of content, using
> globally
> concentrated services (Technorati, et al.) that harvest that
> content
> into multiple single places. The interesting question is what
> makes
> these approaches work (or not) and what we can learn from them to
> help
> fill our repositories (centralised or distributed) without relying
> solely an a "thou must deposit" type approach.
>
> But as I said on eFoundations... imagine a world in which every
> institution mandated to their academics that they must only blog
> using
> an institutional blogging service - would that support or hinder
> the
> development of a vibrant academic blogging environment?
>
> And before you ask, I wouldn't mandate that people deposit in a
> globally
> concentrated service either - for me, the only mandate that
> matters for
> OA is one that says that scholarly output must be surfaced openly
> on the
> Web.
>
> Andy
> --
> Head of Development, Eduserv Foundation
> http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
> http://efoundations.typepad.com/
> [log in to unmask]
> +44 (0)1225 474319
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Repositories discussion list
> > [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leslie
> Carr
> > Sent: 10 March 2008 10:30
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving
> >
> > On 10 Mar 2008, at 09:55, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> >
> > > Brewster Kahle may have the disk space, but if his is to
> become the
> > > global database, then why should individuals have local
> websites at
> > > all? They could all set up shop in the Global Wayback
> > Machine -- or,
> > > for that matter, store directly in Google, saving it the
> trouble of
> > > having to harvest!
> >
> > Brewster or Google can do all they like - if the content
> > ain't there it can't be harvested. People often think that
> > somehow "repositories"
> > are failing, but they're no different from "web sites" in
> > that respect. An examination of research and university web
> > sites show that researchers have out-of-date, incomplete
> > pages and sometimes no pages at all. My own Head of School's
> > home page is just in the form of an FTP listing of some files
> > he occasionally puts there. Others of my senior colleagues
> > have home pages that are over three years old and miss out on
> > describing an entire generation of projects and their outputs.
> >
> > The fundamental problem is not repository software, it is
> > researcher's disinclination to disseminate. And I am
> > convinced that the repository software isn't fundamentally at
> > fault because I have never, ever, ever heard anyone refuse to
> > use our institution's timetabling software because the user
> > interface isn't good enough (though it is appalling), or
> > because it doesn't integrate into their personal calendar (which
> it
> > doesn't) - they just get on and use it because it does a job
> > they need to do.
> >
> > But that isn't to say that we at won't be working our hearts
> > out trying to make EPrints better and more functional!
> > --
> > Les Carr
> >
|