(I love these Friday afternoon discussions!)
Social networking as an approach to obtaining information is clearly
vital, and has in fact been around since the beginning - if I remember
back to the days when I trained as a librarian, the only approach to
obtaining 'grey literature' was to find out who was researching in your
field and write them for any recent working papers! The latest Web2.0
stuff facilitates this process nicely. But I would argue there is still
a role for more traditional metadata-based approaches that seek to
address the issue of recall, which I'm not sure that social networking
does.
SWAP (which Andy of course helped create ;) is not complicated in that
it asks for more information than is already known about an object, it
just attempts to capture more of that information than Simple DC does.
In fact SWAP would be simple to use if it was incorporated properly into
repository software - it simply comes down to good interface design then.
I still think that decent metadata is of high value for information
retrieval and has its place alongside other techniques such as social
networking. We're also looking at what can be done with text mining of
full text documents in the Intute Repository Search project with NaCTeM,
for alternative means of retrieval, so I always feel it's a mistake if
discussions end up implying an either/or approach!
Phil
Andy Powell wrote:
> It seems to me that Google's lack of support for OAI is largely a
> non-event - because their support for it was (ultimately) a non-event.
> They never supported it fully in any case AFAIK and, in some cases at
> least, support was broken because they didn't recognise links higher in
> the server tree than the OAI base URL.
>
> It highlights the fact that OAI will never be a mainstream Web protocol,
> but so what... I think we spotted that anyway!
>
> There are technical reasons why OAI was always going to struggle (I say
> that only with the benefit of hindsight) because of its poor fit with
> the Web Architecture. Whilst I don't suppose that directly factored
> into Google's thinking in any sense, I think it is worth remembering.
>
> On the 'social' thing I very strongly agree and I've argued several
> times in the past that we need to stop treating stores of content purely
> as stores of content and think about the social networks that need to
> build up around them. It seems to me that the OAI-PMH has never been a
> useful step in that direction in the way that, say, RSS has been in the
> context of blogging.
>
> Simple DC suffers from being both too complex (i.e. more complex than
> RSS) and too simple (i.e. not rich enough to meet some scholarly
> functional requirements). Phil Cross suggests that we need to move
> towards a more complex solution, i.e. SWAP. OAI-ORE takes a different
> but similar step in the direction of complexity - though it is probably
> less conceptually challenging that SWAP in many ways. ORE's closeness
> to Atom might be its saving grace - on the other hand, it's differences
> to Atom might be its undoing. Come back in 3 year's time and I'll tell
> you which! :-)
>
> I like SWAP because I like FRBR... and whenever I've sat down and worked
> with FRBR I've been totally sold on how well it models the bibliographic
> world. But, and it's a very big but, however good the model is, SWAP is
> so conceptually challenging that it is hard to see it being adopted
> easily.
>
> For me, I think the bottom line question is, "do SWAP or ORE help us
> build social networks around content?". If the answer is "no", and I
> guess in reality I think the answer might well be "no", then we are
> focusing our attention in the wrong place.
>
> More positively, I note that "SWAP and ORE" has quite a nice ring to it!
> :-)
>
> 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 Paul Walk
>> Sent: 02 May 2008 11:53
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Google, OAI and the IRs
>>
>> 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-support
>> ing-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
>>
>> --------------------------------------------
>> Paul Walk
>> Technical Manager
>> UKOLN (University of Bath)
>> http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
>> [log in to unmask]
>> +44(0)1225383933
>> --------------------------------------------
>>
--
---------------------------------
Phil Cross
Senior Technical Researcher
Institute for Learning and Research Technology
University of Bristol
8 - 10 Berkeley Square
Bristol, BS8 1HH
Tel: +44 (0)117 928 7067
Fax: +44 (0)117 928 7112
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/aboutus/staff?search=cmpac
-----------------------------------
|