Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Richard Poynder 's recent blog post " Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository? " has generated a lot of discussion, including a second post from Richard to address the comments and the always insightful commentary from David Rosenthal (" Why Did Institutional Repositories Fail? ").  There surely have been enough articles about institutional repositories to fill an institutional repository, but of particular interest to me are discussions about the technical and aspirational goals of OAI-PMH . A year ago Herbert and I reflected on OAI-PMH and other projects (" Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts "), which I wish Richard would have referenced in his discussion (although Cliff does allude to this in his interview (MLN edit: Richard points out that I missed his quoting of that paper in his second blog post )), as well as the original SFC and UPS papers.  For his response to Richard, ...

Earlier this week Herbert Van de Sompel gave a webinar for the ICSU World Data System entitled " Web-Centric Solutions for Web-Based Scholarship ".  It's a short and simple review of some of the interoperability projects we've worked on through since 1999, including OAI-PMH , OAI-ORE , and Memento .  He ends with a short nod to his simple but powerful " Signposting the Scholarly Web " proposal, but the slides in the appendix give the full description. The main point of this presentation was to document how each project successively further embraced the web, not just as a transport protocol but fully adopting the semantics as part of the protocol.  Herbert and I then had a fun email discussion about how the web, scholarly communication, and digital libraries were different in 1999 (the time of OAI-PMH & our initial collaboration) and now.  Some highlights include: Although Google existed, it was not the hegemonic force that it is today, and co...