http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/presentations/olybris_keynote_2005.pdf
Slides (59!) of a presentation given by Herbert van de Sompel at my birthday, last monday.
See also the weblog of Lorcan Dempsey, Repositories ain’t what they used to be …
Here are some quotes.
Implications of the repository model:
Before they know it, institutions will be swamped with digital information of all kinds
Libraries seem to be the natural parties to take care of this vast growth of digital collection:
• Local repository (ies)
• Thousands of remote repositories
Characteristics & consequences of this model:
• Value chains starting in repositories
• Local capacity
• Archiving
• Rights
• Interoperability
• Standards
Value chains starting in repositories
• New knowledge is really being created when allowing for nonanticipated use of stuff.
• These repositories are not about creating services for local users (only)
• These repositories are not about creating a service (user interface) for all users
• These repositories are about facilitating the use of materials in many contexts
• These repositories are the starting point of value chains
To allow value chains to emerge on the basis of materials in repositories, those repositories need a clear/clean machine interface that allows downstream applications to consume materials, aggregate them, build services, …
⇒ Disconnection of repository content and service: allows for creation of both local and remote services
⇒ On-Web: Protocol-oriented interface
⇒ These value chains are about the real stuff not (only) about metadata
Local capacity
• Need basic infrastructure to be able to deal with digital materials of all kinds
• Infrastructure has the real stuff, not metadata at its core
• DSpace, eprints.org, Fedora, …
• Doctypes?
• Vertical application vs basic plumbing?
• Service-orientation?
• On-Web?
• Multiple repositories?
• Scale?
Rights
• Urgent need for an environment in which scholarly assets behave in a manner that matches the “gift exchange” spirit of scholarship.
• James Boyle: Think about what we loose by sticking with the current paradigm!
enormous constraints on ability to use scholarly assets:
process to extract knowledge, attach knowledge, mine,
evolve, build upon: robots are the next generation readers
Interoperability
• Use and re-use of materials in global context
o Clean/clear machine interface is not enough.
o Need cross-repository content-level interoperability
o Interoperable, global federation of repositories
Architectural issues include:
o Object representation (MPEG-21 DIDL, IMS/CP, METS, .)
o Object identification
o Object harvesting
o Object disseminations
o Object relationships
o Discovery of object repositories
o …
Standards
• Standards are the glue that holds the networked information environment together.
• Standards are crucial to facilitate the emergence of improved and integrated services across repositories.
• As the information environment becomes more complex, and as we move towards new levels of services, we will need more, not less standards.
Standards/Interoperability context
• Standardization efforts/bodies in our community are seriously challenged:
o Many standards defined outside our community.
o Lack of impact on major standardization bodies of the networked world (W3C, IETF, IANA, …)
o Problems to interconnect within and amongst related efforts in our community: digital library, grid computing, e-learning, library automation, …
o Operational models/processes not adequately adapted to the realities of the networked world (cf. patent challenges OpenURL, MetaSearch)
o Funding for standardization efforts and related infrastructure is very hard to find (cf. OAI, CIMI, info URI Registry, OpenURL Registry, …)
A content-node & service-node ecology?
• Content nodes:
o Libraries become content-nodes, capturing the intellectual output of their parent institutions and “exposing” it.
o Vision: A network of federated repositories that makes available the collective intellectual output of faculty and researchers of the world’s research institutions
o Ongoing with the Institutional Repository movement
o Libraries must act in this realm
A content-node & service-node ecology?
• Service nodes:
o Need services (value chains) to emerge on top of that content
o “If the content is on-Web, the services will bloom”
o Can not solely rely on … euh .. Google Scholar
• Service node tasks include:
– indexing, searching, recommendation, linking, datamining, visualization, … nodes
– annotation, certification, metric-collecting, rewarding, … nodes
– archiving, normalization/transformation, … nodes
• Vision: A federation of networked services – in which Libraries take on specific service tasks – that turns into a global scholarly value chain
The repository model
Physical libraries:
• Local storage of content originating with 3rd parties
• Facilitate use of that content by local user base
Current libraries:
• Remote storage of content originating with 3rd parties
• Facilitate use of that content by local user base
Repository model libraries:
• Local storage of content that originates in-house
• Facilitating its use by remote and local users by facilitating the emergence of services
Emergence of a quite fundamental new library model