On 02/09/10 13:25, Leslie Carr wrote:
> On 2 Sep 2010, at 12:38, Andy Powell wrote:
>
>> But our attitudes to quality ("every deposit much be mediated thru a librarian"), volume ("let's build a UK-only repository search engine") and speed (which I interpret to mean our increasing ability to machine-process information out of large quantities of data, as opposed to having to manually catalogue it) it seems to me are highly relevant to this list.
>
> So could we create a (literally) poor man's Intute? Do we have any extra bits and pieces of technical and social information infrastructure that could help us rescue some the the value that Intute provided in a way that provides a new take on the same problem? Or is the ultimate lesson that we have to learn that we "should have but don't want" quality signifiers and that every individual their own Intute?
Being an academic service, and therefore concerned with education as
well as publication, one could argue that Intute always intended to do
itself out of the peculiar job that is the cataloguing of internet
resources over which one has no ownership or control. Hence, the
investment in, and promotion of, the Virtual Training Suite and related
resources (<http://www.intute.ac.uk/training.html>). Indeed, for some,
the VTS was likely more valuable than the resource catalogue (and
indeed, JISC have provided a further year's funding to help sustain the
VTS).
If a service cannot get itself embedded in the key business processes of
its target userbase then it's probably doomed. And I'm sure that over
the next year similar questions will continue to be posed to other
services, both institutional and national, if their recurrent cost rises
above mere 'noise' on the general ledger.
Mike
--
Dr Michael Fraser
Head of Infrastructure Systems and Services
Oxford University Computing Services
Tel: 01865 283 343
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mikef/
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