Hi David,
I partly agree with your first point - in terms of straightforward
search, Google clearly dominates and is, for many, good enough.
However it seems to me that there are, potentially, other services
which might be offered on the basis of a 'scholarly information
ecosystem', which Google for example are less likely to want to offer.
If repositories are viewed as content management systems, or in the
case of institutional repositories as 'asset' management systems, then
we can begin immediately to think of archiving/preservation, of
workflow, of showcasing & marketing, of trend/gap analysis and
'community intelligence'. I guess I believe that an emphasis on
'discovery' through search might tend to obscure other potentially
valuable aspects of the repository network.
There have been varied reactions to the story on Google withdrawing
support for Sitemaps based on OAI-PMH targets. I blogged about this
briefly - the comments which were made on my post represented some of
this variety [1].
Regarding your second point - I tend to agree more strongly. One
vision for the future is that we increasingly deal with information
overload by allowing our networks of trusted individuals to filter,
recommend, distill etc. the flow of information. This has been
happening in some form for ever, of course, but the systems supporting
'social networks' are getting rapidly better and are finding their way
into many of our 'workflows'.
[1] http://blog.paulwalk.net/2008/04/23/google-gives-up-on-supporting-oai-pmh-for-sitemaps/
Cheers,
Paul
On 2 May 2008, at 11:19, David Kane wrote:
> Hi Santy,
>
> My perspective on this is that the repository service model just has
> not taken off. I think the hope was that digital repositories might
> have formed the basis for some kind of scholarly 'information
> ecosystem' but this hasn't happened. This may be partly due to the
> presence of Google which, although it does a fantastic job, does make
> people less likely to adopt other search strategies. The repository
> service model won't take off in the future either, at least not on its
> own. It is based on an old indexing paradigm, which alone does not
> deal with the 21st century problem of information overload.
>
> What's going to happen, I think, is that people are increasingly going
> to discover relevant scholarly information through social networks in
> the future.
>
> Cheers
>
> David.
>
>
>
> 2008/5/2 Santy Chumbe <[log in to unmask]>:
>> Phil,
>>
>> Are you surprised to learn that Google's reason to no longer
>> support OAI
>> harvesting is that "the information we gain from our support of OAI-
>> PMH is
>> disproportional to the amount of resources required to support it"?
>>
>> I wonder what the amount of resources invested by our institutions to
>> harvest & normalize IR metadata via OAI is.
>>
>> Sitemaps was one of the few ones if not the last Google product to be
>> offering OAI support.
>>
>> Santy
>>
>
>
>
> --
> David Kane
> Systems Librarian
> Waterford Institute of Technology
> http://library.wit.ie/
> T: ++353.51302838
> M: ++353.876693212
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