Neil,
Hi. I've been following this discussion with some interest, which has been a
remarkable (and speedy!)canter around the main arguments concerning repositories
during the past 11 years or so.
These arguments were never settled because people want different things from
repositories, and have different understandings of how they might be built. The
original OAI-PMH was a technical solution for the creation of a repository
infrastructure, and was intended as a tool which could be used within a wider,
people built organisational infrastructure. Resource-Sync is another technical
solution which might also be useful within such an infrastructure.
While of course there are technical issues which need to be addressed, technical
solutions should really follow agreement on the *function* of repositories. We
never got that. Indeed, by 2005, discussion of the architecture within the OAI-
PMH more or less ceased, at least in the UK, and repositories became a space in
which you kept things. Which was easy to understand, if it wasn't actually
helpful to the effort to create repository infrastructure.
I'm with Thomas for the most part: we need technical solutions, but we also need
to understand the problems which need to be addressed, and to broker agreement
about what is actually wanted from repositories in terms of function, and
agreement on the technical solutions which are necessary to achieve that. Only
then will we get agreement about a repository architecture which will function
usefully across the globe.
Above all, the community needs to agree on what it wants from an organisational
infrastructure surrounding repository services. This is the bigger picture,
beyond the nuts and bolts of building services. This infrastructure needs to
support scholarly communication in terms of both text and data, and it also
needs to be able to support scholarly communication at a global level, and
therefore needs to rest on a scalable and standardised system architecture.
That isn't the OAI-PMH or Resource-Sync. Maybe Open Mirror might start with that
question, and discuss with academics and researchers, the users, exactly what it
is that they might want from such a service.
Best wishes,
Philip Hunter
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