Terence Love wrote:
> Say 10% of all publications are design research related and assume 1000
> universities in the world suggests the repository size would be equivalent
> to 10000% of the size of a repository for all subjects of a single
> university.
I think we have our wires a little crossed.
I am suggesting that the design research society could provide its
members with a place to deposit their publications. We have fewer
members than most universities have academics and not all would take up
the opportunity but some may not have any other opportunity.
In addition we may be aware of specific past publications that need
conserving and might propose to add them, For example I can think of a
few PhD theses that might be lost or inaccessible and that I think are
significant and there may be sets of proceedings or out of print
journals that we value. The recent scramble to obtain and archive copies
of Henrik Gedenryd's thesis exemplifies this.
The value therefore is to ensure that people in our community have an
opportunity to archive their work where it may be downloaded even if
they do not work in a university with its own archive (I can think of
retired or non-university researchers that would benefit) It also
follows the principle of LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). I
suspect the main use will be for archiving "at risk" publications that
have no other home.
And Terry's scenario would never happen because it requires people to
place things in a repository, most institutional repositories are
struggling to get a reasonable number of their own staff to upload their
publications.
Finally I must reiterate that I don't believe there is a lot of scope
for managed or edited archives, they are expensive and vulnerable to
decay, self-archiving in a globally linked repository achieves nearly as
much and is self-sustaining.
So I welcome Ken's proposal to set up a repository at Swinburne. I don't
see it as a heavily managed universal archive, rather as a valuable aid
to conservation and a valuable service to members of the design research
community whose own institutions will not or cannot provide them with
such a resource.
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