On 16 Sep 2010, at 11:32, Stephen Downes wrote:
My resources are also on my personal website, not the institutional
web server. There are some very good reasons for this:
I completely agree that there are very good reasons for doing this, especially when the institution is not offering easy, stable, long-term hosting services.
Institutional archives should recognize this as a fact. They should
focus on downloading
copies of original works for
preservation (just as Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/ does).
I don't think that it is appropriate for everyone to put their original material in a repository! Putting copies in there may well be the best way of working.
But repositories certainly should maintain a copy of material as you suggest. It may be that Jorum have already taken a "dark copy" of the material for preservation purposes and that my message to the list was a bit peremptory.
Instead, therefore, of creating a set of requirements and
impositions on academics, provision of access to this record
would be an invaluable service to academics (certainly I've
had occasion to recover lost material from Internet Archives, mostly
because some institution deleted it).
But for those who are deliberately creating "Open Educational Resources" (and specifically entering a competition for such) then some requirements are not out of order :-)
