The meeting achieved several interlocking goals: introduced the members of the Panel to each other and to the librarians taking part in the grant activities; allowed the librarians to explain what harvestable metadata is, how OAI works, and what its potentials for digital scholarship are; allowed the scholars to ask questions about their role in the project; and allowed the librarians to test assumptions against a sample audience and to receive feedback fairly early in the grant’s timeline. The bulk of the first half of the meeting was taken up with a series of discussions and demonstrations of existing OAI tools and prototypes, and to an explanation of where OAI has come from and where we hope to take it as a library service. The University of Michigan’s OAIster, Emory's Metadata Migrator, UIUC's Experimental OAI Registry, the CIC OAI collection, and The University of Waikato’s Greenstone were all demonstrated. The second half of the meeting on the following day started with a discussion of the OAI Best Practices work, MODS, and DLF Aquifer. There was early on an observation from a scholar that many of their Web projects are going into their second generations and this may be a good time to influence scholars to add metadata and use services such as OAI harvesting. It was also noted that there is an inherent tension between the individualism that drives much humanities work and the consistency across projects that a service based on harvested metadata requires....There was very high value placed on being able to find quickly archival material on a subject. This was seen to be the single best potential for OAI services of the sort that we demonstrated....There was a strong feeling that the services we demonstrated were too “library-focused” --they gave too much priority to the name of the institution from which an object came-- this was seen as good PR for the library but not a particularly useful thing for the scholar to know (at least, not of prime value earlier in the searching process). The item and its collection are of prime importance, not the institution that holds the item.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/29/2005 08:44:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
