I think I'd approach this from a slightly different perspective by asking two questions:
1) what resources do the URIs exposed by a typical repository identify?
2) does Memento serve a useful purpose in the context of any of those resources/URIs?
(Aside: I suspect the first of these isn't particularly easy to answer in a Semantic Web sense, especially given FRBR-like notions of works and items and the fact that there might not be anything that represents 'typical' in this area... but let's ignore that for now?)
The two most obvious kinds of URI are those for the (so-called) jump-off page (e.g. http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/48073/) and those for the individual documents that have been uploaded into the repository (e.g. https://secure.eprints.soton.ac.uk/soton/secure/00048073/01/Rampmetering.pdf).
Individual documents grow by addition (I assume) - so I tend to agree that it is not clear what useful purpose Memento might serve. Each time a new document is added, it is given a new URI. In extreme circumstances, the document at a particular document URI might be deleted but it is never modified or replaced.
The jump-off page presumably does change over time, as new versions of documents are added? Is that right? If so, it strikes me that it might be useful (in a citation sense) to see how the jump-off page has changed over time? I presume that it is the jump-off page that we expect people to cite??
Does that make any kind of sense or am I totally out of touch with how repositories work?
Andy
--
Andy Powell
Research Programme Director
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Repositories discussion list [mailto:JISC-
> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Chris Rusbridge
> Sent: 15 February 2010 16:41
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Interest in Memento?
>
> I think being able to access the version of a resource as it was at a
> prior time is an important aspect of the citation process (hence
> WebCite, for example, or the retained earlier versions in Wikipedia).
> So i think Memento potentially has a place in the scholarly process.
>
> What the role of Memento should be in relation to repositories, I'm
> less sure. In particular, if the repository grows by addition rather
> than by change then I don't see a huge advantage. I think I mean here
> that if the repository's documents are regarded as fixed, then you
> don't need to show changes to them. (This might not be true in certain
> preservation cases, of course, in relation to technology changes and
> obsolescence, but it's not clear how Memento would survive such a world
> either).
>
> I can imagine other kinds of repositories (for example, data
> repositories) where change might be more likely to occur. These use
> cases might need a little further analysis before one would be
> confident that a service like memento would be helpful, but it feels
> like they/it should be!
>
> --
> Chris Rusbridge
> Director, Digital Curation Centre
> Email: [log in to unmask] Phone 0131 6513823
> University of Edinburgh
> Appleton Tower, Crichton St, Edinburgh EH8 9LE
>
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
>
>
>
> On 15 Feb 2010, at 11:53, Leslie Carr wrote:
>
> > Have you heard of Memento, one of Herbert van de Sompel's recent
> projects.
> >
> > "Have you ever felt frustrated by your inability to get to old
> versions of Web pages? Did you bookmark a page last year, and revisited
> it recently only to find that the current content isn't even remotely
> related to what caught your interest back then? ... Wouldn't it be much
> easier if you could just connect to cnn.com, Wikipedia, or
> news.bbc.co.uk indicating that you are interested in the pages of March
> 20 2008, not the current ones? If you could activate a time machine in
> your browser or bot?" (http://www.mementoweb.org/)
> >
> > We (EPrints) have been asked to think about providing support for
> this facility in our repository software, but we'd like to get some
> feedback from the community.
> >
> > Would this be useful to anyone? What use cases can you foresee?
> Indeed, have you ever felt frustrated by the lack of this facility, as
> the project page assumes?
> > --
> > Les Carr
> >
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