I referenced a note by Andy Powell on institutional repositories and Google in an earlier post. Herbert Van de Sompel left a comment pointing to a short document he has prepared addressing some of Andy’s concerns based on recent work with OAI-ORE. Here are a couple of the opening paragraphs ….
This write-up is an impromptu response to Andy Powell`s Repository Usability blog entry. It also touches on some issues that Andy raised in another entry, Freedom, Google-juice and institutional mandates. The purpose of the write-up is to try and alleviate some of Andy`s pain regarding the status quo of scholarly repositories: while the current situation may indeed not be perfect, a possible solution may not be too hard to establish. The solution I describe uses the OAI-ORE specifications, and quite some other techniques that have been introduced by several communities over the past years. Hey, a technological mash-up, one could say. Use and reuse what is there before inventing new stuff is the motto. I am afraid that the solution may cause Andy some phantom pain, since it also leverages OAI-PMH. While I agree that there are a few things we didn`t get quite right with OAI-PMH, I don`t think it`s the cause of all evil in the (repository) world, and I actually even think we can leverage the existing deployed PMH repositories for a good cause
Anyhow, I think the DSpace example of Andy`s blog entry is a nice one to have a close look at, indeed. The four URIs that are a source of frustration for Andy, are an indication to me that OAI-ORE Aggregations can come to the rescue. As a matter of fact, the ORE Primer uses an arXiv example that is quite similar to the DSpace one: lots of URIs flying around that somehow belong together. [Repository Usability – Herbert’s Take]
